The New Yorker:
High-minded and scandal-prone, a foe of marriage who dreamed of domesticity, Fuller radiated a charisma that helped ignite the fight for women’s rights.
By James Marcus
In the four and a half decades since its founding, the Library of America has issued not only the pillars of our national literature but such populist fare as the lyrics of Cole Porter and a volume devoted to “Peanuts.” This is certainly the right move—the jazzy and the colloquial are the very lifeblood of our culture. Still, it’s curious that it has taken until 2025 for these gatekeepers to anoint Margaret Fuller with a book of her own.
Chalk it up, perhaps, to Fuller’s blurry role in the canon. Although her brief life is richly documented, she often fails to come into focus. A sworn enemy of marriage who longed for a husband and child, a Transcendentalist who made a beeline for revolutionary Europe, an incurable gossip and an erstwhile Platonist: she is all these things and is defined by none of them.
“Margaret Fuller: Collected Writings” (Library of America) should help to sharpen the picture. Its editors, Brigitte Bailey, Noelle A. Baker, and Megan Marshall, have embedded Fuller’s two books and a selection of her reportage in the context of her journals and correspondence. This seems like a wise approach for an author whose life speaks to us as eloquently as her work. It wasn’t enough for Fuller, in other words, to produce the first major feminist manifesto in American history. She also put flesh on its bones by breaking the rigid rules of gendered conduct whenever possible, which is why the pioneering activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton later described Fuller’s work as “a vindication of woman’s right to think.”
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