Finding Margaret Fuller

Frank S. Robinson
5 min readOct 6, 2024

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October 6, 2024

I’ve written about Maria Popova’s book, Figuring. Among others, it discusses Margaret Fuller (1810–1850), whom I practically fell in love with. Then, coincidentally, just as I was reading this, one of my book groups took up Allison Pataki’s Finding Margaret Fuller. A novelized but apparently pretty accurate first-person life story.

Fuller was an intellectual dynamo. Pushing the boundaries at a time when women just weren’t taken seriously. (Especially unmarried ones like her.) Fuller changed that, speaking out, in the most eloquent compelling way, for ideas so far ahead of their time they still aren’t fully accepted even today.

Women’s equality was her chief cause; her seminal book Woman in the Nineteenth Century was a sensation at the time. We may have some idea that in the past women were second-class citizens. In fact they weren’t really citizens at all. Confined to an existence as mere appendages to men, virtually property, with no notion of having lives of their own.

This is what Margaret Fuller was up against. Finding relates her doing research in Harvard’s library. Just gaining entry was a major undertaking. She was literally the first woman ever to set foot there.

But it wasn’t just women Fuller sought to uplift — it was everyone. All those without a full opportunity to live flourishing lives. That, to her, was what America was uniquely all about. And while this was indeed the one place in the world vaunting such lofty ideals, in her day the gap between the ideal and the reality was large. Even today, though we’ve come quite far along the road Fuller envisioned, we are still a work in progress. Those ideals, and that progress, fill me with love and inspiration. They’re now under mortal threat.

Fuller was a gender-bender both in her intellectual pursuits and her personal life. So intense in her loves it seems to have been self-defeating. Early on she was gaga for a beautiful young woman, Caroline; another was Anna; when those relationships faded, she latched onto Sam, seemingly a soulmate, but he too stepped back from the fiery heat. Then suddenly Anna reappears, visiting her. Days later, Fuller learns the reason for the local visit — she’s shattered to read the announcement of Anna’s engagement — to Sam. But she pulls herself together sufficiently to convey them sincere good wishes.

Finding never even mentions those three abortive loves (and a couple of later ones); it begins with Fuller’s relationship with the married Ralph Waldo Emerson. (It wasn’t physical.) Yet they struggled mightily to get to grips with their bond’s intensity. But Emerson too found he wasn’t up to giving Fuller all she craved.

A key theme was how Fuller and Emerson both were dedicated to broadening minds and encouraging independent thought — especially for women. This was a time of great intellectual ferment. The story makes for a strange contrast with today. I have to remind myself that the kind of outlook epitomized by the likes of Emerson and Fuller, however large they do loom in intellectual history, was something confined to just a very rarefied slice of America’s population. The vast bulk of which was going about its business elsewhere entirely, with no concern for the deep issues preoccupying people like Emerson and Fuller.

Whereas today’s America seems to be roiling in storms of engagement over such matters. In wide-ranging debate about what sort of society we should be; all our political and culture wars. You might think Emerson and Fuller would love this. Yet I see a great difference with what they were about. Engaged in a philosophical quest for truth, almost esoteric, with great intellectual seriousness. Hardly words anyone would apply to today’s American divisions — where the ideas themselves are just weapons, and the combat isn’t really philosophical at all, but almost nakedly tribal. It’s not mass intellectual advancement we’re seeing but a mass reversion to primitivism.

To be brutally clear, what I’m talking about here pertains mainly to MAGA America. A cultural phenomenon betokening the opposite of progress. Indeed seeking reversal of much of the progress we’ve achieved, in making a more open and inclusive society with universal opportunity. A society they’re trying to tear apart. This cultural atavism driven by a thorough rejection of what Emerson and Fuller would have considered essential to any ideas-based striving — that is, rejection of the very meaning of truth. Making seeming battles over issues really so much sound and fury.

Both books chronicle Fuller’s yet more remarkable end story. Horace Greeley, of the New-York Tribune hires her as an editor, then sends her to Europe as America’s first foreign correspondent. In Italy, she finds what she feels is her true home. And her true love: Giovanni Ossoli, a man of the heart, not the mind, thus unlike all her prior attachments. She finally relinquishes her virginity, marries (apparently), and bears a child. The couple gets caught up in Italy’s late 1840s democratic revolution, which fails. So they sail to America.

Popova’s account stops with the ship just yards from shore. But then exactly 301 pages later, the book concludes with the rest of the story. The shipwreck in which Margaret, Ossoli, and their child, all perished — together with the sole manuscript of what Fuller considered her most important work, a book about the Italian revolution.

Throughout her life, Fuller harbored an uncanny fear of water, foreseeing it as her doom. She’d been terrified to board that ship.

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