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Margaret Fuller, 1810-1850
Drowned in a shipwreck, Margaret Fuller is the tragic heroine of the Transcendentalist movement -- an idealistic American literary and philosophical movement that stressed the unity of all creation -- and the first major woman intellectual in American history. Eccentric, beguiling, and at times maddeningly erratic, Fuller had an electric impact on her mostly male colleagues, not least because she was a talented editor and writer on contemporary culture. She edited the Transcendentalist journal The Dial with Ralph Waldo Emerson and George Ripley and became a critic for Horace Greeley's New York Tribune. In 1839 she began a conversation group among Boston's women that led to the treatise Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845). While traveling in Europe, where she assisted in the cause of Italian nationalism, she married an Italian marchese. She and her family died on their return voyage to the United States.
Thomas Hicks, 1848
Lent by Constance Fuller Threinen |