Megan Marshall

I do so love reading about exceptional and unconventional women, especially one from the early 1800s, and doubly especially one who is disagreeable by contemporary accounts (triply so if they were not from the usual privileged background which is not the case here).

Educated beyond society standards for a woman at the time (a combination of her father's strict homeschooling fueled by his own failed ambitions, not by any proto-feminist beliefs, and mostly her own uncompromising discipline), show more Fuller acutely felt the disadvantages of her sex and immense intellect (the necessity/expectation of marriage, the tertiary education denied to women, y'know, the usual patriarchy nonsense). The life of Margaret Fuller is remarkable not just for her role as one of the few women in history whom we can point to as having achieved success in a public domain and herald as an inspiration to future women, but also for her extraordinary intellect matched only by her intense discipline.

The scene where Margaret welcomed her male contemporaries (friends, even) to join her Conversations (weekly-themed discussion group intended to inspire like-minded women to question, to define, to state and examine their opinions, to learn to art of intellectual debates and discussions, and most of all, to question their own positions in society) only for it to be dominated by the men deriding the theme of Greek mythos, claiming it lacking and requiring the completeness of Christian revelations, and eventually bringing it around to contemporary church matters, that is, avenues from which women were/are excluded, that scene, it made my blood boil. Another blood-boiling instance was when her father, failing another ambition and now secretly of meagre income, moved the entire family to a farm and assumed her to be a spinster for the foreseeable future, promising her a Europe trip if she tutors all her younger brothers into Harvard (youngest is seven now). Frustrations all round for Fuller and all women denied their full potentials!

Marshall is as detailed as it is possible for a biography to be, quoting from period documents and making it clear when she's extrapolating. Recommended for feminism studies or general interest.

Aside: incredible seduction line that I was not expecting from Fuller: some day when you are not bound to buying and selling, and I, too, am free... you will perhaps... show me some one of those beautiful places which I do not yet know. show less

Megan Marshall’s book is a wonderfully readable account of the life of Boston-born Margaret Fuller (1810-1850), an early feminist. Her father was her primary educator, “designing” her course of study at home. A tough taskmaster he was, which turned out to be of great value to her, for he died young. She needed then to provide for her mother and her siblings. After a short teaching gig, she realized that, although she was successful, it was not her passion - she desperately wanted to show more write. Another passion was engaging women in developing their intellect. To this end, she led a series of Conversations, to which the women of Boston subscribed, meeting weekly to discuss literary topics. These two passions served to support her family.

Though not born of wealth, she was a friend of the Transcendalists in New England, in particular of Ralph Waldo Emerson whom she held in thrall. She wrote constantly, letters and essays, always looking to Emerson for intellectual commentary and discussion. In fact, she probably would have liked a closer union, but he couldn’t be moved in that direction, and sometimes treated her harshly.

The book traces the life of a woman ahead of her time. In her early years, she envied her friends who married and had children. Though that would come later for her, she was content to be a woman of intellect and action. A trip to the Midwest that opened her eyes to a world away from Boston, the publishing of two well-received books and numerous articles, the “plum” job as literary editor of Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune where she finally gained confidence and received the accolades that she deserved, and the trip as foreign correspondent in Europe that was to prove so momentous for her and bring her fulfillment of the wish for a child – all these events unfold beautifully with Marshall’s prose to guide the reader and with Fuller’s words that are liberally quoted throughout.

Not only did Fuller’s writing display her wide range of literary knowledge, but it is styled so beautifully with just the right turn of phrase. In the 1970’s, during the heat of the women’s liberation movement, T-shirts were printed with a quote from her famous book, Woman of the Nineteenth Century. Taken out of context from her belief that women should be able to be what they want to be, the quote was “Let Them Be Sea-Captains.” But it’s probably not one she would have picked. Instead, believing as she did that women should be taught and held to high standards, she might have preferred this one:

"Who would be a goody that could be a genius" show less

Megan Marshall basically lived with the Peabody sisters while writing this book (as much as someone can live with a trio of sisters who've been dead for more than 100 years), and it shows in her writing. She delved into their correspondence, their personal journals, their friends' letters to other friends about the sisters, news stories, census reports. And then she took all of this and turned it into the compelling story of three sisters at the center of a huge philosophical shift that took show more place in New England in the first half of the nineteenth century.

What's really interesting to me was how big an influence the Peabody women had on the men whose names are usually associated with the period: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Horace Mann, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Theodore Parker, William Ellery Channing. I wasn't exactly surprised by this---I'd already read Megan Marshall's biography of Margaret Fuller---but it's still jarring to see just how easily otherwise enlightened men could brush off the accomplishments and intellectual lives of the women around them, and how readily so many women accepted their limited role in society.

I heard on the news today about some story of poor judgment (at best) on the part of a public figure in Boston, and the commentator said, "Why are we not taking to the streets about this?" I have the same feeling when I read about the Peabody sisters. Why aren't the women studying with Elizabeth Peabody and meeting in her book shop rising up and throwing off the restrictive roles their society has handed them? I can speculate about the reasons---all very good ones, too---but it still doesn't quite make sense to me how the granddaughters of those who fought to make the United States into an independent country didn't fight more dramatically on behalf of their own independence.

The other thing that I found interesting was the negative impression I was left with of Emerson, Mann, and Hawthorne. They so obviously used the intelligent women around them, toyed with their affections, pitted sister against sister, and still the sisters defended these men and fought amongst themselves (in a very genteel, epistolary, nineteenth-century way, but it was fighting nonetheless). It's just another reminder, I guess, that although men are placed on pedestals by the writers of history, they are still human beings. Once again, not surprising, just disappointing.

In addition to being an intimate story of the sisters as individuals and of their sisterhood, this is also an excellent history of the Unitarian church. I've often wondered how we got from Calvinism to Unitarian Universalism in fewer than three centuries, and this book helped me make sense of it for the first time. It also sheds light on some of the ongoing friction points within the denomination. show less

I've been putting off writing about this book even though it will certainly make my "best of the year" list, mostly because I had such an intensely personal reaction to it. Margaret Fuller was a woman I was only peripherally aware of-- like so many remarkable women, whose achievements remain overlooked by those who continue to see men first, and women...a far second, a curiosity--her accomplishments were always "background" material in other books, other reading. I knew she was in Emerson's show more circle of Transcendentalists, I knew she was a social reformer and early advocate for women's rights, an influence on Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

But that is all I knew until Megan Marshall's perceptive biography, which among other things will make one ask just why it was considered "Emerson's" circle, and not Fuller's.

I wasn't expecting to identify so strongly with Marshall's subject, though. But the portrait of the woman that emerges felt achingly familiar. A precocious child, whose father believed in a strong classical education even for his daughters, Margaret Fuller was fluent in Latin before she was ten years old, and spent hours in debate with her father, who was of a progressive bent, honing her ability to think critically and construct a logical argument. Like her father, she idolized Roman Republican values. Cicero was a personal hero.

This kind of early intensive education made her intellectually confident when she finally entered school, but also socially awkward and emotionally naive--two traits that would dog her for most of her early adolescence and into her early maturity. She was, as we might say now, a brainy girl. A bit of a geek. It was a painfully familiar picture.

In consequence, Marshall portrays a woman whose passions and emotional attachments were idealistic, her heart often in service to her ideals, rather than the other way around. And thus, although she was adept at forming serious friendships and deep attachments, they had a way of disappointing her when the object of her regard failed to live up to her ideals. She all too often failed to take into account the emotional realities of her friends, even her close ones, and they seem to have often felt the need to draw back from Fuller's demanding brand of intense intellectual intimacy.

The moment when the book really coalesced, however, was after the death of Fuller's father, leaving Margaret, as the oldest and most independent of his children, responsible for supporting the family (something her mother was not equipped to do and none of her younger brothers old enough to contemplate). At this period the family is forced to retire to a family "farm" (the word deserves the quotes--it was another of her late father's educational experiments) and eke out their living on the little money they could inveigle from a wealthy but parsimonious uncle and what Fuller herself could earn writing reviews for magazines and taking in students for instruction in the classics. (She also taught her own younger brothers, since the family could not afford to send them to a school).

It was a severely constrained life for Fuller, who until then had participated in or organized any number of salons and discussion groups and had been making a name for herself in intellectual circles. And it was in the midst of this isolation that she, doing the usual round of "good works" expected of women in her social class, went to attend the bedside of a woman dying of what she was told was consumption, but which turned out to be complications from a botched abortion. A short while later, she paid a charitable visit to an ancient widow and her elderly daughter -- each abandoned to their own devices in their poverty, without kith of kin to care for them, left to an endless series of days huddled by a fireplace eating whatever bread charity society workers left for them. These two incidents, which Fuller wrote about in vivid detail in her journal, seem to have been brackets or bookends to the question of a woman's fate if she did not exist under the protection of a man. Marshall identifies this period as the time when Fuller's feminism and radicalism began to sharpen and achieve its focus, setting Fuller on a path that would eventually lead to her declaration of the institution of marriage as a form of slavery, and commitment to working with women prisoners -- most of whom, she decided, owed their incarceration to the way men forced women to live their lives.

I originally picked up Margaret Fuller: A New American Life as part of a binge of reading about the transcendentalists, thanks to Robert Richardson's enormously impressive biography of Emerson, The Mind on Fire. Richardson calls his book "an intellectual biography." If that is so, then Marshall's might be called an "emotional biography" -- if we can divest the word from its current pop-psychological tones and find in it instead an account of how one woman grew into her passion and life's calling.

It was a calling that consumed her from within and without (like most driven people she was a workaholic). And to the end of her all-too-short life she would write about her struggle to realize her fullest potential in a society where "an independent woman" was something of an absurdity. An idea for which there was no place. And despite all Fuller's accomplishments -- she became the first foreign correspondent for am American newspaper, covered Europe during the revolutionary fervor know as the "European Spring," was a friend to George Sand, knew Garibaldi, was close with many Italian and Polish Republicans-- despite all this, she still to the end of her days struggled to be both a woman and "a human" in the same body, so to speak. And right up to her death society denied her this one wish. Did not, it seems, even understand what she was asking for, was demanding.

I found much to identify with in Fuller's lifelong struggle to live as she would often write "to her fullest potential." It's hard not to think, watching (as an example) the irrational hostility engendered by Hillary Clinton's political career, that any woman with aspirations wouldn't find Fuller's frustrations familiar. "Potential" always seems to be measured against the expense of the other well-defined roles women are required to fill: Daughter. Mother. Wife. Mistress. That Fuller persisted so steadfastly in pursuing her own idea of what it was to be a complete person, in defiance of everybody's expectations -- even her most intellectual friends and most radical compatriots -- is a testament to her will and conviction. Perhaps, in the end, it is only in the struggle to be ourselves in the face of all that is expected of us that we can be said to realize that "full potential" Margaret Fuller was forever chasing. show less