Margaret Fuller (1810–50,) fully Sarah Margaret Fuller Ossoli, was an American woman’s rights activist, journalist, transcendentalist, literary critic, and editor. Her efforts to refine the taste and enrich the lives of her contemporaries make her significant in the history of American culture.
Born in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, Fuller was educated by her father before attending the local school at age 14. She went on to teach in Boston (1836–37) and Providence (1837–39.) There she assumed a significant role in the transcendentalist clique that centered on Ralph Waldo Emerson.
In 1839–44, Fuller conducted a series of conversations and seminars for educated women in Boston. One of the outcomes of these discussions was her landmark feminist work Women in the Nineteenth Century (1845,) which contends that women as a spiritual being should be liberated from male-imposed social restrictions.
From 1840–42, she was the editor of The Dial, the transcendentalist journal, and in 1844 went to New York, where she became a literary critic for the New York Tribune. Moving to Italy in 1847, she worked as a foreign correspondent and while there, met and married Marquis Giovanni Ossoli, an Italian nobleman and republican.
After becoming involved in the unsuccessful 1848 Revolution in France, Fuller sailed for New York with her husband and infant son, but the ship was wrecked in a storm off New York’s Fire Island, and all aboard were drowned.
Fuller’s other publications include Summer on the Lakes (1844.) Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Henry Channing, and James Freeman Clarke compiled her Memoirs (1852.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Margaret Fuller
Nature provides exceptions to every rule.
—Margaret Fuller
Topics: Nature
Man tells his aspiration in his God; but in his demon he shows his depth of experience.
—Margaret Fuller
Topics: Aspirations
It is not because the touch of genius has roused genius to production, but because the admiration of genius has made talent ambitious, that the harvest is still so abundant.
—Margaret Fuller
Topics: Genius
The especial genius of women I believe to be electrical in movement, intuitive in function, spiritual in tendency.
—Margaret Fuller
Topics: Women
Truth is the nursing mother of genius? No man true can be absolutely true to himself, eschewing cant, compromise, servile imitation, and complaisance without becoming original.
—Margaret Fuller
Topics: Truth
It is astonishing what force, purity, and wisdom it requires for a human being to keep clear of falsehoods.
—Margaret Fuller
Topics: Reality
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