Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life

by Charles Capper

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199889631
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	02/08/2010
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

Charles Capper is Professor of History at Boston University. In addition to writing the acclaimed first volume of Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life, he is coeditor of The American Intellectual Tradition and the journal Modern Intellectual History.

Table of Contents

Preface     ix
Acknowledgments     xix
Transcendental Editor     3
Romantic Recoveries     44
Liberal Awakenings     81
Virgin Lands     123
Concords and Discords     158
New York Star     194
Young America's Critic     234
Ambassador of the World     279
Risorgimento     320
Year of Revolutions     363
Foreign Correspondence     402
States of Siege     426
Florence Exile     459
Dark Passages     498
Abbreviations     521
Notes     529
Index     625

Editorial Reviews

This long-awaited second volume of Capper's Bancroft Prize–winning biography of Fuller fulfills all expectations. Capper follows Fuller's increasing literary fame and her travels to the American West and to Europe; he also recovers her thinking on topics ranging from religion to "the woman question." Fuller emerges as a proto-modernist, someone who "managed to slip more completely than any other intellectual of her generation the leash of Victorian repressions and evasions." Fuller articulated a radically Transcendental critique of classical Christianity, arguing that if men and women did not interpret the Bible "by the freedom of their own souls," they would render the Bible untrue. Capper offers a nuanced and sophisticated reading of Fuller's tracts on gender, which he says have important philosophical and literary qualities. He treats Fuller's personal life as well, chronicling her struggles with finances, her relationship with Emerson and her affair with an Italian partisan 10 years her junior. Debate has raged for 150 years about whether Fuller and Giovanni Angelo Ossoli actually married or whether their son was illegitimate. Capper cautiously concludes that they likely did marry in 1848. Capper has crafted both an intimate life and a subtle analysis of Fuller's work. 36 b&w illus. (May)

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Publishers Weekly

Almost 15 years after the publication of his Bancroft Prize-winning first volume, Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life, Capper (history, Boston Univ.) returns to Fuller's final decade. He begins the narrative briskly in 1840 with Fuller's tenure as editor of the transcendentalist journal Dial, then follows her life through her later stints as a travel writer, critic, and poet. Fuller reflects her era but always remains on the cutting edge of philosophical thought as a recognized and respected female intellectual of the Romantic Age. Fans of the earlier book will especially enjoy Capper's insights into Fuller's friendships with Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Sand, and other literary giants. While lengthy and extremely detailed, this narrative of a fascinating woman, complete with extensive notes, is very readable. Highly recommended.
—Jan Brue Enright

Library Journal

"Charles Capper's first volume of a projected two-volume life offers much detail to help us appreciate a remarkable mind....Scholars of this period should value Capper's clarity as well as his thoroughness; and feminists should rejoice that Margaret Fuller's history has been enlarged and deepened."—Historical Journal of Massachusetts

"Capper's study emerges as the authoritative account of Fuller's early life for its original and timely scholarship, rich historical texture, and balanced interpretations. Capper writes in an engaging style that gives vitality to the life of thought he chronicles."—Legacy

"This inherently feminist book results in the richest account we have yet of Fuller's formative years....Capper matches Fuller (and she was an astounding reader) in his study of the classical, republican, romantic and Transcentalist thought that influenced hers. Hence he is more able than any previous biographer to do justice to the nuances of her aesthetic commitments and to her religious, political and social thought."—The Nation

"Capper's superb biography is the first full-length modern rumination on Fuller's enduring riddles....Capper removes Fuller from the realm of the exemplary and restores her connections to the world around her—and to readers as well....Capper's mastery of the broad trans-Atlantic cerebral world in which Fuller lived is total, and he manages at once to convey the social pathos of her situation and the covert intellectual excitement....He is a master of intellectual genealogies and of the finely hewn debates and fierce contestation they spawned, and he conveys eloquently the living presence of the life of the mind."—Christine Stansell, The New Republic

"What a stunning book Charles Capper has written!...What Capper has done—simply, elegantly, and stirringly—is to take the tools of the biographer's craft and put them to exquisite use in fashioning a fascinating portrait of the first major woman intellectual in the United States. It is an absorbing story, fraught with the kind of rich detail and easy readability that might characterize a good novel."—Mary Kupiec Cayton, Journal of American History

"If Capper's second volume, on Fuller's public years, equals his first, he will have produced not only a definitive biography but also a broadly conceived addition to American intellectual and social history."—Jane H. Pease, American Historical Review

"Her short, dramatic life seems to invite constant reinterpretation, and many biographers have been drawn to it. Charles Capper is the latest and the best of them: his treatment of her life, and especially her work, marks an important break with his predecessors....Eminently readable....Illuminating."—Women's Review of Books

"At last, a definitive biography of the great American feminist writer Margaret Fuller. Only a scholar of uncommon learning, like Charles Capper, could have dealt with so formidably learned a subject and located her in the intellectual world of her times."—Daniel Walker Howe, Oxford University

"Charles Capper has written an engrossing biography which conveys the adventure of Margaret Fuller's life and the complexity of her thought. It places Fuller solidly among the major writers and intellectuals of her generation. And it is a good read!"—Linda K. Kerber, University of Iowa

"Charles Capper has written the best biography of Fuller yet. He has skillfully re-created early nineteenth-century American literary and cultural life, and placed Fuller within it. The research is superb, the writing gracious. This book will stand the test of time."—Joel Myerson, The University of South Carolina

"On the basis of the first volume alone it is clear that Charles Capper's biography of Margaret Fuller will remain definitive for the foreseeable future. More than a comprehensive and moving biography, it provides a fresh look of the origins of American Romanticism and a sensitive examination of the relationship between femininity and intellectuality within nineteenth-century culture."—Ruth H. Bloch, University of California, Los Angeles

"This admirably-researched biography is certain to become the place of first resort for anyone wishing to ascertain the facts of Margaret Fuller's life."—Lawrence Buell, Harvard University

"Capper's lively prose enriches Fuller's story and leaves readers eager for the second volume in his account of this extraordinary woman's life."—Magill Book Reviews

"Charles Capper offers the most comprehensive account yet of the first thirty of Fuller's forty years and the most serious scrutiny of her evolving thought....Most engrossing reading."—Culturefront

"The vitality of [Fuller's] mind and strength of her character are brilliantly revealed. The scholarship is impeccable; the writing, impressive; the vision, thoroughly embedded in the intellectual and social history of the early decades of the nineteenth century."—Nineteenth-Century Literature

"One great portrait of Margaret Fuller has survived, a familiar photograph of her in profile, reading. Now a second great portrait emerges, this one in words by biographer Charles Capper. No longer in profile, this portrait is a multi-dimensional picture, a motion picture that reveals its subject growing, unfolding, developing against the background of Boston and environs after her birth in 1810, and among the people who served as powerful influences in her life....[A] masterful portrait of Margaret Fuller, the most comprehensive to date, and likely to become the definitive biography of this important figure in nineteenth-century American history."—Journal of the Early Republic

"What a stunning book Charles Capper has written!...What Capper has done—simply, elegantly, and stirringly—is to take the tools of the biographer's craft and put them to exquisite use in fashioning a fascinating portrait of the first major woman intellectual in the United States. It is an absorbing story, fraught with the kind of rich detail and easy readability that might characterize a good novel....Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life will be required reading for students of American intellectual or cultural history, American women's history, transcendentalism, or American romanticism. In a time when the machinery of the academy demands that books be turned out early and often, this is the rare work that shows clearly the effects of years of thought and meticulous research."—The Journal of American History

"Capper's rich biography invites one into conversation with a complex personality and shifting intellectual and social currents that surely will continue in the second volume, The Public Years."—American Studies

"Capper's impressive scholarship brings to Fuller the attention she deserves as the most important intellectual woman of the antebellum period. This book is a 'must read' for specialists in American history, women's studies, and American literature."—Katherine G. Aiken, University of Idaho

"The strength of this densely researched, thoughtfully written biography is in its story of Fuller's intellectual life."—Nancy Fix Anderson, Nineteenth Century Prose

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