(Sarah) Margaret Fuller

Feminist and literary critic, born in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, USA. Her father, Timothy Fuller, was a prominent Massachusetts lawyer-politician who, disappointed that his child was not a boy, educated her rigorously in the classical curriculum of the day. Not until age 14 did she attend school (1824–6) and then returned to Cambridge and her course of reading. Her intellectual precociousness gained her the acquaintance of various Cambridge intellectuals, but her assertive and intense manner put many people off. Her father moved the family to a farm in Groton, MA (1833), and she found herself isolated and forced to help educate her siblings and run the household for her ailing mother.

After visiting Ralph Waldo Emerson in Concord, she taught for Bronson Alcott in Boston (1836–7), and then at a school in Providence, RI. During this time she continued to enlarge both her intellectual accomplishments and personal acquaintances. Moving to Jamaica Plain, a suburb of Boston (1840), she conducted her famous ‘Conversations’ (1840–4), discussion groups that attracted many prominent people from all around Boston. In 1840 she also joined Emerson and others to found the Dial, a journal devoted to transcendentalist views, and became a contributor from the first issue and its editor (1840–2). Her first book, based on a trip through the Midwest (1840–2), was Summer on the Lakes (1844) and this led to an invitation by Horace Greeley to be literary critic at the New York Tribune (1844). She published her feminist classic, Woman in the Nineteenth Century in 1845. In addition to writing a solid body of critical reviews and essays, she became active in various social reform movements. In 1846 she went to Europe as a foreign correspondent for the Tribune, and in England and France she was regarded as a serious intellectual and met many prominent people.

She went on to Italy (1847) where she met Giovanni Angelo, the Marchese d'Ossoli, ten years younger and of liberal principles; they became lovers, had a son (1848) and married (1849). Involved in the Roman revolution of 1848, she and her husband fled to Florence in 1849. They sailed for the USA (1850) but the ship ran aground in a storm off Fire Island, NY, and their bodies were never found.

Sarah Margaret Fuller (May 23, 1810 - June 19, 1850) was a journalist, critic and women's rights activist.

Fuller was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (The house in which she was born is still standing today,and is now occupied by an active community outreach program.) Her father, Timothy Fuller, a lawyer, gave her a vigorous classical education which was testing enough to have a lasting effect on her health.

Fuller became friends with Ralph Waldo Emerson and was subsequently associated with transcendentalism.

In the mid-1840s she organized discussion groups of women in which a variety of subjects, such as art, education and women's rights, were debated. Ideas brought up in these discussions were developed in Fuller's major work, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), which argues for the independence of women.

She was sent to Europe by the New York Tribune as a foreign correspondent, and there interviewed many prominent writers including George Sand and Thomas Carlyle—whom she found disappointing, due to his reactionary politics amongst other things. The couple supported Giuseppe Mazzini's revolution for the establishment of a Roman Republic in 1849 - he fought in the struggle while she volunteered to work in a supporting hospital.

Fuller, her husband, and her son all died when a boat transporting them back to America from Italy sank off Fire Island, New York. Among the articles lost was Fuller's manuscript on the history of the Roman Republic.