Margaret Fuller: “A Short Essay on Critics”

About the Author

Sarah Margaret Fuller was born in Cambridgeport (now part of Cambridge), Massachusetts, in 1810. Her childhood was dominated by her father, Timothy Fuller, who gave her a rigorous education in literature and philosophy at home. Influenced by such German Romantic writers as Johann Goethe, she embraced the belief that God was found in both man and nature and that each individual was responsible for his or her own moral advancement. After the death of her father in 1835 she began teaching, first in Providence, Rhode Island, and then at an experimental Boston school conducted by Bronson Alcott, an important figure in the Transcendentalist movement. Fuller became a close friend and creative ally of other Transcendentalists, most notably Ralph Waldo Emerson. Her brilliance and energy won her many admirers in Boston's intellectual circles, though others found her arrogant and domineering. Her eloquence as a speaker led her to conduct a series of so-called Conversations held around the Boston area. These were actually courses in philosophy and aesthetics, primarily for women, that attracted a devoted following.

In 1840 Fuller became editor of the Dial, a small but highly influential magazine featuring contributions by Emerson, Alcott, Thoreau, and other Transcendentalist writers. Besides editing the writings of others, she contributed numerous critical essays and literary reviews over the publication's four-year life span. As a critic, she championed free expression in American writing and advocated greater equality between the sexes. Fuller's combination of scholarship, idealism, and mystical insight brought her detractors as well as devotees. Her refusal to take a deferential “feminine” tone as a writer infuriated her male peers. Her fellow critic Edgar Allan Poe reputedly claimed that humanity could be broken down into men, women, and Margaret Fuller.

Fuller's travels among the frontier communities of the American Midwest resulted in her first book, Summer on the Lakes, in 1843. Restless for new challenges, she accepted the editor Horace Greeley's offer to join the staff of the New-York Tribune in 1844. Arguably the first female investigative journalist in American history, she delved into such topics as slavery, urban poverty, and prison reform. While she was at the Tribune, she published her controversial work Woman in the Nineteenth Century in 1845, followed by Papers on Literature and Art in 1846. That same year she sailed to Europe for a long-delayed Continental tour, during which she met Thomas Carlyle, George Sand, and other leading writers and thinkers. While visiting Italy in 1847, Fuller met and fell in love with the Marchese Giovanni Angelo d'Ossoli. Fuller shared Ossoli's commitment to Italian revolutionary nationalism and helped direct a hospital for war victims during the siege of Rome in 1848. The couple had a son in September 1848 and married in the spring of 1850. In May of that year Fuller, with her husband and child, set sail for America. They were killed in a shipwreck during a storm off Fire Island, New York, in July. Fuller's body was never recovered.