Sarah Margaret Fuller, an outstanding essayist and Philosopher, was born on 23rd of May 1810, and raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts. From a modest financial background, she was educated at home by her father, Timothy Fuller who was an American lawyer and legislator. She became a child prodigy in the classics and modern literatures. Her special passion was German Romantic literature, especially Goethe, whom she translated.
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By the age of 6 she could read fluently Ovid, Virgil, and Horace in Latin, and by 12 she was engulfed in Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Moliere. She loved the study of Locke's metaphysics and enjoyed Plato.
In 1933 she moved to Groton. In 1935 both her father and mother grew ill, upon her father's death she took over the household duties, and became head of the family. She also met Ralph Waldo Emerson that year, and became his devotee, as he became her teacher, mentor, and prophet.
In 1836 Fuller taught school in Providence, Rhode Island. In 1839 she moved back to Boston, and was rejoined by her mother and sisters. In 1840 she accepted the editor-ship of Dial, the Transcendentalist quarterly from Emerson. In 1842 she gave up the editorship, and traveled extensively through the american west. In 1844 she began writing for the Tribune in NYC, where she became a major literary critic.
Fuller's Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845) is the earliest and most American exploration of women's role in society. Often applying democratic and Transcendental principles, Fuller thoughtfully analyzes the numerous subtle causes and evil consequences of sexual discrimination and suggests positive steps to be taken. Many of her ideas are strikingly modern. She stresses the importance of "self-dependence," which women lack because "they are taught to learn their rule from without, not to unfold it from within."
The first professional woman journalist of note in America, Fuller wrote influential book reviews and reports on social issues such as the treatment of women prisoners and the insane. Some of these essays were published in her book Papers on Literature and Art (1846).
While visiting Rome in 1847 she fell in love with Marchese Giovanni Angelo d'Ossoli, a nobleman involved in revolutionary activities. They had a child a year later, a son named Angelo, and married the following year. During the of Revolution of 1848 and during the siege of Rome by the French forces, Fuller assumed charge of one of the hospitals of the city, while her husband took part in the fighting. The city fell in 1850 and the Ossolis were forced to flee. In May 1850, they sailed to America. They were almost there, when off the coast of New York, near Fire Island, their ship ran aground in a storm and was wrecked on July 19, 1850. Her friends, among them Thoreau, initiated searches, but only the body of their two-year-old son was recovered. A plaque at the Margaret Fuller Memorial on Pyrola Path in Cambridge, Massachussets says the following: "By birth a child of New England; by adoption a citizen of Rome; by genius belonging to the world. In youth an insatiable student seeking the highest culture; in riper years teacher, writer, critic of literature and art; in maturer age companion and helper of many earnest reformers in America and Europe."
Published Works:
Conversations with Goethe in the Last Years of His Life, Translated from the German of Eckermann(1839)
Summer on the Lakes (1843)
Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845)
Papers on Literature and Art (1846)
Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1850)
Conversations with Goethe (1852)
Literature and Art (1852)
Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (1852)
Love-Letters of Margaret Fuller 1845-1846 (1903)
The Letters of Margaret Fuller (1983-1988)
Bibliography and image source: distinguishedwomen.com
