Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life Volume II: The Public Years

Filled with dramatic, ironic, and sometimes tragic turns, this superb biography captures the story of one of America's most extraordinary figures, producing at once the best life of Fuller ever written, and one of the great biographies in American history. In Volume II, Charles Capper illuminates Fuller's "public years," focusing on her struggles to establish her identity as an influential intellectual woman in the Romantic Age. He brings to life Fuller's dramatic mixture of inward struggles, intimate social life, and deep engagements with the movements of her time. He describes how Fuller struggled to reconcile high avant-garde cultural ideals and Romantic critical methods with democratic social and political commitments, and how she strove to articulate a cosmopolitan vision for her nation's culture and politics. Capper also offers fresh and often startlingly new treatments of Fuller's friendships with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Carlyle, and Giuseppe Mazzini, in addition to many others. 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 themnever 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--andpresents 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, tothe 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 Contents......Page 8 Preface......Page 10 Acknowledgments......Page 20 1. Transcendental Editor......Page 26 2. Romantic Recoveries......Page 67 3. Liberal Awakenings......Page 104 4. Virgin Lands......Page 146 5. Concords and Discords......Page 181 6. New York Star......Page 217 7. Young America’s Critic......Page 257 8. Ambassador of the World......Page 302 9. Risorgimento......Page 343 10. Year of Revolutions......Page 386 11. Foreign Correspondence......Page 425 12. States of Siege......Page 449 13. Florence Exile......Page 482 14. Dark Passages......Page 521 Abbreviations......Page 544 Notes......Page 552 A......Page 648 B......Page 649 C......Page 650 D......Page 653 E......Page 654 F......Page 655 G......Page 658 H......Page 660 J......Page 661 L......Page 662 M......Page 663 N......Page 664 O......Page 665 P......Page 666 R......Page 667 S......Page 668 T......Page 670 W......Page 671 Z......Page 672 The premier modern biography of this paradigmatic avant-garde writer's life. Capper draws fully on first-hand sources in this first volume of his two-part biography to paint a compelling portrait of the private life of an organizer of the Dial and an important figure in early American literature.