The editors of these three books make a vigorous case for the cultural importance of Margaret Fuller (1810–50). "Given the range of her interests and the sophistication of her writing, no other American woman of her time, with the possible exception of Emily Dickinson, so commands our attention," writes Robert Hudspeth, a professor of English at the University of Redlands. Fuller is "today established as a canonical figure," according to Fritz Fleischmann, a professor of English at Babson College in Massachusetts. The past 20 years have seen the publication of Fuller’s letters, essays, journals, and translations, and in 1992 the first volume of Charles Capper’s magnificent biography, Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life, both positioned her in the larger context of American intellectual history and illuminated the extraordinary scope and drama of her life. Consequently, suggests Fleischmann, Fuller "may no longer require advocacy."

As the mother of all American feminist intellectuals and the author of Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), Fuller should be well known, yet to most educated Americans she is nothing more than a name in a textbook. There is no Margaret Fuller Memorial, no museum, no national holiday, not even a postage stamp. Despite enormous academic interest in her life and work, Fuller has not captured the American historical imagination. From Nathaniel Hawthorne to Louisa May Alcott, her Concord neighbors enjoy a popular acclaim that she has yet to receive. Advocacy of her importance is still very much required.

Why has Fuller faced so much resistance as an American intellectual heroine? It’s not because her life lacked excitement. She managed to be in all the right places at the right times, from highminded New England to brawling New York to revolutionary Italy. With inspiring courage, she transcended the limitations of her environment and upbringing to live a truly epic woman’s life. She wrote the most influential American feminist tract of the century, visited women prisoners at Sing Sing, met the leading intellectuals and radicals of Europe, and made the daring decision to have a child in a secret affair with a young Italian revolutionary. But summarizing her credo is a difficult task, one she herself never managed to accomplish. When taken together, her essays, pamphlets, poems, and reviews demonstrate a powerful, original mind. One by one, though, they are unlovable, too often stiff or prolix or rambling. She didn’t have Thoreau’s folksiness or sententiousness, or Alcott’s narrative gift. Judith Mattson Bean, an English professor at Texas Woman’s University in Denton, and Joel Myerson, a professor of American literature at the University of South Carolina, add significantly to the Fuller canon with their selection of more than a hundred articles she wrote as literary editor of the New-York Tribune in the 1840s (all 250 of her Tribune articles are included on the CD-ROM that accompanies the book). During the two years she wrote analytical pieces for the paper, Fuller tried to establish the parameters of a responsible literary criticism, defended the novel as the representative American literary genre, and, in the editors’ words, "embarked on a process of reshaping her identity." In columns that displayed her increasing political confidence and radicalism, she wrote about the turbulent daily life of New York and about work of all kinds, including intellectual work. In so doing, she "explored the full range of the essay as a genre: the character sketch, parable, prose epistle, journalistic essay, periodical essay, hortatory essay, and book review."

Yet Fuller was still uncertain of her stance as a feminist writer. In a review of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, she adopts a masculine disguise: "What happiness for the critic, when, as in the present instance, his task is mainly to express a cordial admiration." The review goes on to characterize women as prone to sentimentality and excessive attention to minor details. Praising much of Browning’s work, Fuller nonetheless concludes, referring to the poet’s epics, that "we shall never read them again, but we are very glad to have read them once." Much the same sentiment, alas, applies to Fuller’s critical writings. Despite their learning, they lack fire.

By contrast, Fuller’s personal writings, her journals and letters, show her at her passionate best, unsparingly using her intellect to explain her life. Hudspeth edited the monumental six-volume edition of her letters, and he provides a sampling of them in "My Heart Is a Large Kingdom." Fuller made the personal letter a "literary form," he argues, one that she used to "bring news, both about herself and about her world." While Fuller scholars will welcome the collection of her Tribune criticism, as well as Fleischmann’s collection of essays on her intellectual affiliations and legacies, Hudspeth’s selection of the letters is likely to win her new readers and admirers. The great drama of Fuller’s life came during its last years, from 1848 to 1850, when she was in Italy with her younger Italian lover, Giovanni Ossoli (no one knows for sure whether they ever married), and their baby son, Angelino. The letters from these years, describing the political upheavals of the Italian revolution, but also trying to explain her choices and her emotions to friends at home, are almost too moving to read. Here Fuller brings all her intelligence to bear on the circumstances of her life: a woman of genius, accepting the love and tenderness of a man far beneath her in intellect, daring to bear his child, and finding herself profoundly changed by maternity.

"I thought the mother’s heart lived in me before, but it did not," she wrote to her sister Ellen. "I knew nothing about it." To a friend, she wrote: "You would laugh to know how much remorse I feel that I never gave children more toys in the course of my life.... I did not know what pure delight could be bestowed." She begged her sister to ask her friends to write: "I suppose they don’t know what to say. Tell them there is no need to say anything about these affairs if they don’t want to. I am just the same for them I was before." The honesty and clarity of these letters is especially poignant in light of what lay ahead: Having decided to brave public disapproval and make a life back in the United States, Fuller and Ossoli, along with their son, were drowned in a shipwreck off Fire Island.

Had she survived, her public writings might have grown more like her private letters, capable of touching readers’ emotions as well as their intellects. Perhaps the tragic story revealed in these letters will move Margaret Fuller beyond the textbooks at last.

>Elaine Showalter is a professor of English at Princeton University. She is an advisory editor of the Cambridge Guide to Women’s Writing in English (1999) and the author of Inventing Herself: Claiming a Feminist Intellectual Heritage (forthcoming).