Margaret Fuller 

 

“The especial genius of women I believe to be electrical in movement, intuitive in function, spiritual in tendency.”
-Margaret Fuller

 

 

Margaret Fuller was born Sarah Margaret Fuller on May 23, 1810, in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, one of nine children. She attended Misses Prescotts’s school in Groton, Massachusetts, and then spent time in Cambridge, where she received some further education. In 1833, she became a teacher of young children at Groton farm. Sadly, her father, Timothy Fuller, died in 1835, and Margaret became the head of the family. A year later she taught German and Italian at Bronson Alcott’s Temple School, and she also met and became friends with Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson in Concord.

 

For two years, between 1837 and 1839, Margaret taught at Hiram Fuller’s Green Street School in Providence, Rhode Island. Also in 1839, she translated Eckermann’s Conversation with Goethe and moved to Jamaica Plain with her family and started Boston and Cambridge Conversation classes. She was also a member of the Transcendental Club along with Emerson, Louisa May Alcott, W. E. Channing, and Jones Very, among others.

 

From July 1840 to July 1842, Margaret was the editor of the magazine The Dial, and even included some of her own articles in it. In 1841, Brook Farm was created, but both she and Emerson decided not to join because they believed in their individuality so much. A year later, in 1842, Margaret completed and published the translation of Correspondence of Fraulein Guderade and Bettina von Arnim. In 1844, she published her first book, Summer on the Lake, which detailed some of her own accounts. It also helped her receive her job as a literary critic for the New York Daily Tribune, and then she moved to New York.

 

Margaret completed Woman in the Nineteenth Century, which became a classic of feminist thought, and published Papers of Literature and Art in 1846. Also in 1846, Margaret acted as a foreign correspondent in Europe for the Tribune. She traveled to Italy in 1847 and fell in love with and married Marchese Ossoli. She gave birth to their son, Angelo, named after one of his father’s middle names, on September 5, 1848. Then, in 1849, Margaret was chosen as the director of a Roman hospital during the sieges of Rome and took care of the sick and dying.

 

On May 17, 1850, Margaret, her husband, and her son died while sailing for America due to an ocean accident. In 1852, her friends Emerson, W. E. Channing, and J.F. Clarke wrote a book in tribute to her called Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli.