Margaret Fuller: A New American by Megan Marshall

The author of this Margaret Fuller biography vascillated between sympathy for the plight of an intelligent and ambitious woman who was severely hampered by the constraints of her time and admiration for what she accomplished despite those constraints.  I was impressed that she was able to manage the irritation that I felt.  Fuller was fortunate to have access to the great Romantic thinkers and writers of her time.  She was on a first name basis with Ralph Waldo Emerson (known by her and other friends as 'Waldo'), Henry David Thoreau was visibly distraught when she was lost at sea, and she was a leader in the women's rights movement and knew all of the leaders who went on to meet at Seneca Falls and moved the women's sufferage movement foreward.  So she had tremendous influence, and successes that were worthy of admiration for a man of her time, not just as a woman.  So what is it that I found so irritating about her?  She just came across in the book as relatively naive about the realities of intimate relationships.  She was almost laughably clumsy in her relationships with men, and despite her great insights into many things, and she seemed completely unable to meet her own needs for intimacy.

 

She became so frustrated with her love life and the constraints on her personal life that she moved to Europe, where she had the incredible job of being a corespondent, writing pieces--as a woman, under a woman's name--about European events.  She seems to have been less unhappy there, and in Italy became involved with an uneducated man who fathered her child and she married.  It was a 180 degree contrast from other men she had been interested in previously--which were men who were her intellectual equals, men she could share her intellectual passions with.  In the end, maybe she found that she needed a different sort of man for her spiritual and personal passions, and by all indications she was happy with him, just worried that when they returned to America that he would not fit in, not with her friends nor with the country.  She never had a chance to see how that would turn out, because her ship, her family, and her book sunk, just yards off the unnavigable shore of Fire Island within clear view of shore.