Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, “Woman” from “The Conversations of Margaret Fuller” (Spring 1840)

Abstract SARAH MARGARET FULLER (1810–1850) was the most important woman in the Transcendentalist movement. An intellectual, teacher, conversationalist, editor, feminist, author, translator, and social critic, she went on from Boston to New York in 1844, where she was the literary critic for the New-York Tribune, and then to Europe, ending in Italy, where she participated in the Revolution of 1848, as well as met her future husband, Giovanni Ossoli. When she returned to America in 1850 with her husband and son, their ship went aground off Fire Island, New York, and all perished. The Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (1852), written and compiled by William Henry Channing, James Freeman Clarke, and Emerson, is a classic example of a woman’s life being refashioned for gendered reasons, as the editors created a “Margaret” who was more religiously orthodox and socially acceptable than they perceived the real Fuller to be.