Volume 42, Number 2 · February 2, 1995
'The Margaret Ghost'
By Millicent Bell
The Letters of Margaret Fuller
1817-1850, in six volumes edited by Robert N. Hudspeth
Cornell University Press, 2017 pp., except volume six, $45.00
Minerva and the Muse: A Life of Margaret Fuller
by Joan Von Mehren
University of Massachusetts Press, 385 pp., $40.00
Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life, Volume I: The Private Years
by Charles Capper
Oxford University Press, 423 pp., $43.00
These Sad But Glorious Days: Dispatches from Europe, 1846-1850
by Margaret Fuller, edited by Larry J. Reynolds, by Susan Belasco Smith
Yale University Press, 338 pp., $37.00
Margaret Fuller's New York Journalism: A Biographical Essay and Key Writings
edited by Catherine C. Mitchell
University of Tennessee Press, 240 pp., $32.50
On July 19, 1850, the freighter Elizabeth, having sailed from Leghorn, was wrecked in a storm on a sandbar off Fire Island, and Margaret Fuller, returning to America after an absence of four years, was drowned along with her Italian husband, Giovanni Ossoli, and their infant child. Watchers on the beach, mostly looters waiting for bits of salvage to be washed up, had seen her on the foundering vessel's deck before it broke up—they were only some 400 yards away. But she and Ossoli vanished under the waves and only the baby's body was ever recovered. Thoreau, sent to the scene the next day by Fuller's great friend Emerson, rummaged in the looters' collections and found Ossoli's coat, and tore off a button as though he, too, wanted some token from the sea. He wrote in his journal,
Review, 5556 words
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