There is a recent Pulitzer Prize winning biography of Margaret Fuller, but the life listed in the bibliographies of books on transcendentalism list most often the two volume work by Charles Capper. Last night I finished the first volume: Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life, Vol. 1: The Private Years. First, Margaret Fuller was a difficult child, difficult in different ways as an adult, and a remarkable adult. Second, this is a remarkably adroit telling of her life through her initiation as a transcendentalist as editor at about 30 of The Dial. She was a polyglot, with special knowledge of Latin, French, German, and Italian, who fully absorbed the whole wide range of the literature she read. She was an intense friend with high expectations of the people she dealt with. She looked, in particular, for a meaningful life by which she meant a life as full as a man's, not just domestic and social certainty. She succeeded importantly, in part thanks to the transcendentalists, but as I shall see in the next volume she died too young. ( )