Margaret Fuller: An American Rom Life, Vol. 1: The Private Years

With this first volume of a two-part biography of the Transcendentalist critic and feminist leader, Margaret Fuller, Capper has launched the premier modern biography of early America's best-known intellectual woman. Based on a thorough examination of all the first-hand sources, many of them never before used, this volume is filled with original portraits of Fuller's numerous friends and colleagues and the influential movements that enveloped them. Writing with a strong narrative sweep, Capper focuses on the central problem of Fuller's life—her identity as a female intellectual—and presents the first biography of Fuller to do full justice to its engrossing subject. This first volume chronicles Fuller's "private years": her gradual, tangled, but fascinating emergence out of the "private" life of family, study, Boston-Cambridge socializing, and anonymous magazine-writing, to the beginnings of her rebirth as antebellum America's female prophet-critic. Capper's biography is at once an evocative portrayal of an extraordinary woman and a comprehensive study of an avant-garde American intellectual type at the beginning of its first creation. First in a 2-part biography of 19th-century transcendentalist and feminist leader. Based on a thorough examination of first-hand sources, this book focuses on Fuller's difficult identity as a female intellectual during her gradual but fascinating emergence from private life. "Eminently readable."--Women's Review of Books. 30 photos. Contents......Page 8 Preface......Page 10 Acknowledgments......Page 14 1. A New England Inheritance......Page 20 2. Childhood Enlightenment......Page 41 3. Rustication......Page 74 4. Cambridge Renaissance......Page 101 5. A Tangled Pastoral......Page 138 6. Apprenticeship......Page 177 7. The Schoolmistress......Page 223 8. Conversations......Page 285 9. The Transcendentalist......Page 340 Abbreviations......Page 384 Notes......Page 390 Index......Page 440 I: PERSONALITY AND TRAITS......Page 445 II: INTELLECTUAL AND CULTURAL ATTITUDES AND PREOCCUPATIONS......Page 447 IV: PUBLISHED WORKS......Page 448 V: UNPUBLISHED AND POSTHUMOUSLY PUBLISHED MATERIAL......Page 449 A modern biography of this paradigmatic avant-garde writer's life, which draws on first-hand sources to paint a compelling portrait of the private life of the editor of "The Dial" and an important figure in early American literature