Volume 56, Number 8 · May 14, 2009
Transcendental Woman
By Christopher Benfey
Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life: The Public Years
by Charles Capper
Oxford University Press, 649 pp., $45.00
Margaret Fuller: Wandering Pilgrim
by Meg McGavran Murray
University of Georgia Press, 515 pp., $44.95
Fuller in Her Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of Her Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates
edited by Joel Myerson
University of Iowa Press, 217 pp., $27.95 (paper)
Margaret Fuller, whose two hundredth birthday will be celebrated in 2010, would seem to be a promising candidate for what Hannah Arendt called the 'definitive biography, English style' in which historical time would be 'refracted by the prism of a great character.'[1] Fuller's eventful life extended from the early years of the Republic, when American political institutions were in their infancy and her father served in Congress, until sectional tensions arising from the Fugitive Slave Act and numerous failed attempts at reconciliation threatened to divide it in two. Her professional life as a teacher, translator, editor, critic, polemicist, and hardworking journalist played out in two successive centers of American intellectual life, Boston and New York, before she shifted her base of operations to Europe.
Review, 3675 words
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