Winner of the 1993 Bancroft Prize and praised in The Nation as 'the richest account we have yet of Fuller's formative years,' the first volume of Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life was acclaimed by critics and scholars alike as the finest portrait available of Fuller's early life. Now, in the much-anticipated sequel, Charles Capper illuminates Fuller's "public years," focusing on her struggles to establish her identity as an influential intellectual woman in the Romantic Age.
Capper brings to life Fuller's dramatic mixture of inward struggles, intimate social life, and deep engagements with the major movements of her time--from outré Boston Transcendentalism to contentious New York journalism and European revolutionary ideas. Capper describes how Fuller struggled to reconcile high avant-garde cultural ideals and Romantic critical methods with democratic social and political commitments, and he reveals how she strove to articulate--through the lens of American idealism and European "experience"--a cosmopolitan vision for her nation's culture and politics. Capper also sheds light on Fuller's complex personal life. He offers fresh and often startlingly new treatments of Fuller's friendships with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Carlyle, and Giuseppe Mazzini and provides new insights into such badly understood intimates as the shadowy James Nathan, the poetic genius Adam Mickiewicz, and Fuller's Roman lover Giovanni Ossoli. Readers will also find lively portraits of many other famous figures with whom Fuller associated, including Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Horace Greeley, Lydia Maria Child, George Sand, and Robert and Elizabeth Browning.
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.