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This chapter examines the childhood enlightenment of Margaret Fuller in Cambridge, Massachusetts, during the period from 1810 to 1821. During this time, most of the local residents were living plainly and Cambridge embodied the high thinking and bookishness of the Puritans. Thought Fuller carried a good deal of Cambridge culture all her life, she later came to see more “narrowness” than coziness in Cambridge. This can be attributed to the fact that Fuller was born and lived most of youth in a house not in Cambridge but in a new development called Cambridge Port.

This chapter examines the life and career of Margaret Fuller during the period from 1838 to 1840. After her resignation at the Greene Street School, Fuller returned home to Massachusetts, sold the Groton farm and moved to Jamaica Plains. During this period, Fuller started meeting with local women to discuss women's rights and the role and purpose of women in life and society. In 1940, he accepted Ralph Waldo Emerson's offer to become editor of the transcendentalist journal The Dial.

This chapter examines the life and career of Margaret Fuller during the period from 1837 to 1838. It describes her teaching at the Greene Street School in Providence, Rhode Island, and her association with Ralph Waldo Emerson. During this period, Fuller also wrote articles packed with contemporary cultural punch including Letters from Palmyra. This chapter also discusses her regular testing of Providence's cultural waters and her later decision to quit teaching the Greene Street School.

This chapter examines Margaret Fuller's early education at Dr. John Park's Boston Lyceum for Young Ladies in Boston, Massachusetts, during the period from 1821 to 1825. At this early stage in her life, Fuller had shown her rather grim determination to succeed and developed two intellectual traits: a critical feeling for literature combined with a heated literary voraciousness. In 1825, Fuller went back and plunged into Cambridge society.

This chapter analyzes writing from the 1840s by protofeminist and transcendentalist Margaret Fuller in order to examine her conceptualization of privacy as a site of utopian democratic unity. Fuller portrays her nation as suffering a crisis of material and spiritual dispossession under its capitalist political economy—a crisis she links both causally and metaphorically to women's oppression, slavery, and Indian removal. Focusing on Fuller's calls for redemption through the “shining examples . . . of private lives,” the chapter traces her deployment of women's life narrative as an instrument of millennial transformation in “Autobiographical Romance” (1840), Summer on the Lakes (1844), and Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845). It argues that Fuller's vision of the “private relations” to be cultivated through such publications displaces the injustices of property relations rather than reforming them, and subordinates racial justice to an ethic of utopian sameness.

This chapter examines New England ancestry and the inheritance of Margaret Fuller, the organizer of the transcendentalist movement journal Dial. Fuller was in her habitat and ancestry a thorough New Englander and her lineage was long, beginning with the first Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. This chapter describes Fuller's negative perception of the Puritans and traces the records of her own Puritan ancestors.

This chapter examines the life and career of Margaret Fuller during the period from 1835 to 1837. Her father's death was a dark turning in Fuller's life because it converted her long-standing resentment of him into depressive anger at herself and brought her anxiety about filling his place in the family. This chapter describes how Fuller served as head of the family, her management of the family's estate, and her assistance in rearing her younger siblings.

This chapter examines the emotional crisis of Margaret Fuller during the period from 1844 to 1845. In her journal she wrote about having her heart wound reopened and about needing a godlike embrace. However, her pains were not reflected in her writings. She wrote a cluster of “July Fourth” pieces for the Dial. One of the poems spoke of powerful fertility goddesses and female titans while another described her self-referential character transfiguring counter to the sorrowful Mary.

This chapter examines the work of Margaret Fuller as editor of the transcendental journal Dial. Three weeks after the journal’s inaugural publication on July 1, 1840, it received various criticisms, including some from literary dilettante William Pabodie. He declared that Fuller, with all her application, had no genuine love of knowledge for its own sake, but for the eclat with which it is attended. The journal also received criticisms from various other publications including the North American Review, Christian Examiner and Cincinnati Daily Chronicle.

This chapter examines the experiences of Margaret Fuller in Italy during the period from 1849 to 1850. In July 1849, Fuller expressed in a letter to her brother that all her private hopes had fallen with the hopes of Italy. Being part of the revolution, Fuller was being hunted by the French and had to go into hiding. After months of enjoying the simple aspects of a limited life, Fuller and Giovanni Angelo Ossoli confronted a dangerous situation when Ossoli accidentally crossed into Neapolitan territory and was arrested. After Ossoli’s release, the couple decided to leave Italy and move to the U.S.

This chapter examines the developments in the career of Margaret Fuller during the period from 1841 to 1842. In mid-February 1841, she wrote a letter to her friend William Channing, and two days after wrote in her journal her wish to become a heroic man. She later wrote Conversations in the Dial, which were densely esoteric and relentlessly allegorical stories. She followed this up with flower tales, also published in the Dial. These were “Yuca Filamentosa” which exploited the ancient esoteric dualisms of masculine/sun and feminine/moon found in much German Romantic writing and “The Magnolia of Lake Pontchartrain” which is about a voluble orange tree that has become a lonely and barren magnolia.

This chapter examines Margaret Fuller’s relocation to New York City to join the staff of the New York Tribune in 1844 under Horace Greeley as a literary critic. Her work in the press started on December 1, 1844. This chapter describes Greeley’s political beliefs and writing style, the factors that contributed to the success of his newspaper and Fuller’s opinion of him. It also describes the development in Fuller’s personal and professional life in New York City.

This chapter examines the life and career of Margaret Fuller during the period from 1833 to 1835. When Fuller returned home her family relocated to Groton, which she resented because of the almost isolated location of the house and because she had to work in the farm. However, she later accepted her situation and made the farmhouse her place of study and reflection. Her favorite author was Romantic Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who had a significant influence on her later career.

This chapter examines the liberal awakening of Margaret Fuller during the period from 1842 to 1843. In April 1842, she expressed her realization that religion was the topic that all topics are in relation to. This awakening may be attributed to her experience in witnessing religion cut deeply into her inner life, which occurred after her half-year crisis following her searing mystical illumination in the fall of 1840. She decided to try again to settle on a personal theology.

This chapter examines the experiences of Margaret Fuller in Italy in 1850. It describes her financial condition and her indecision about going back home to the U.S. When she decided to leave, her final days in Florence were evidently more cheerful, although still marked by some strange omens. These omens include Fuller’s giving of a bible as a parting gift to a friend and the prediction that the sea would be fatal to the Marquis Giovanni Angelo Ossoli. These all came to pass when their ship slammed into a sandbar in New York on July 19, 1850.

This chapter examines Margaret Fuller’s assignment to England as the first female foreign correspondent of the New York Tribune in 1846. During these travels, Fuller wrote about her experiences, and in the process created a new literary genre called travel narratives. After arriving in England, she had the opportunity to interview several prominent writers of the time including Thomas Carlyle and George Sand.

This chapter examines the life and education of Margaret Fuller in Cambridge, Massachusetts, during the period from 1825 to 1833. Fuller went to Harvard University and was culturally influenced by Boston-Cambridge's Unitarian faith. Despite her perfectionist ambitions, Fuller was not a domestic rebel and spent her adolescent years amicably socializing with her family's Cambridge friends. During his later teenage years, Fuller became interested in modern literature.

This chapter examines the experience of Margaret Fuller when she was assigned to Italy as foreign correspondent of the New York Tribune from 1847 to 1848. This was the starting period of the Italian reunification. This chapter describes Fuller’s pioneering Italian studies and teaching and her thoughts about the Risorgimento. It also describes her journalistic work as literary critic and her opportunity to meet some of the most prominent local authors.