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Margaret Fuller, lost Transcendentalist

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February 05, 2012|By Ruth Graham

Margaret Fuller drowned with her young son and his father in a shipwreck… (Getty Images )

When the intellectual, critic, and journalist Margaret Fuller boarded a cargo ship named Elizabeth in the summer of 1850, she did so with a “dark feeling.” American friends had written letters begging her to stay in Rome. Rumors, including that she had conceived her 20-month-old son out of wedlock (true) or purchased him from baby-traffickers (false), were swirling at home in the United States. But Fuller persisted: She was coming, she announced, and bringing not only her family, but also the manuscript of a book she had written about the failed Italian revolution.

Two months later, the Elizabeth was finally nearing New York, when an unusual July hurricane struck the Eastern seaboard. The ship ran aground on a sandbar off the coast of Fire Island. Fuller, her young son, and his father drowned within sight of land. Fuller was 40 years old.

The shipwreck that killed Fuller temporarily sanctified her. Almost immediately, her longtime friend Ralph Waldo Emerson and two others began work on “Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli,” a worshipful but fragmented biographical project. The first 1,000 copies sold out within a day, and for four years it remained the best-selling biography in America. Fuller’s own works were republished frequently over the next several decades, and her renown was widespread. Susan B. Anthony wrote that Fuller “possessed more influence on the thought of American women than any woman previous to her time.” Emerson believed that her “radiant genius and fiery heart” made her “the real center” of the Transcendentalist movement.

No one could have foreseen what would happen to Fuller in the next century: She sank into total obscurity. Today, high school students study the writing of Transcendentalism’s major male figures; tourists visit their homes. But Fuller, every bit their equal as an intellectual and an influencer, has been largely forgotten. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian John Matteson, whose first book was a joint biography of Louisa May Alcott and her father, says it’s been difficult to interest nonacademics in his new biography, “The Lives of Margaret Fuller.” “I had an easier time with the first book, because everyone knows Louisa May Alcott,” he says. “With this one people say, hmm, is that Margaret Sanger?”