Emilija Pliaterytė: "Titulinis puslapis” Margaret Fuller knygai Moteris XIX amžiuje

Margaret Fuller’s reading of Joseph Straszewicz’s The Life of Countess Emily Plater in 1844 apparently made a profound impression on the American feminist-transcendentalist. In Woman in the Nineteenth Century, Fuller included several admiring passages about Emily Plater and suggested an portrait of the Vilnius-born countess for the work’s frontispiece. Selecting Plater as the emblem of her book showed that Fuller had considered the meaning of Plater’s life and wanted readers of Woman in the Nineteenth Century, do the same. Fuller’s strong response to the countess was grounded not only on the gender barrier transgression Plater embodied as a female military figure, but on a number of biographical details that the two brilliant and forward thinking women had in common. Looking at Woman in the Nineteenth Century and The Life of Countess Emily Plater side-by-side suggests that Straszewicz’s biography of Plater was a considerable influence on Fuller’s pioneering masterwork and, therefore, on the development of American feminist thought in its earliest stages.