Episode 361: The Writings of Margaret Fuller

Summary

The Great Books Podcast: Episode 361 - The Writings of Margaret Fuller Host: John J. Miller, National Review
Guest: Megan Marshall, Professor of Nonfiction Writing at Emerson College
Release Date: February 25, 2025

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1. Introduction to the Episode

John J. Miller welcomes listeners to Episode 361 of The Great Books Podcast, focusing on the writings of Margaret Fuller. He introduces Megan Marshall, a distinguished biographer and scholar of Fuller, highlighting her Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life, and her latest work, Afterlives on Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart. Megan joins from Hillsdale College’s campus radio station, WRFH.

2. The Significance of Margaret Fuller’s Writings

Megan Marshall delves into why Margaret Fuller’s collected writings are deemed a great book. She emphasizes Fuller’s complexity and the integration of her life with her ideas, making her a pivotal figure in the American literary canon. The Library of America edition compiles Fuller’s major works, including Summer on the Lakes and Woman in the 19th Century, alongside her extensive journalism, letters, and journals.

“Pulling them all together is what makes this a great book.” [01:16]

Megan discusses the collaborative effort with fellow scholars Noel Baker and Brigitte Bailey to present a comprehensive collection that demystifies Fuller for general readers, showcasing her contributions to literature, journalism, and feminist thought.

3. Margaret Fuller and Literary Criticism

John and Megan explore Fuller’s essay from 1840, A Short Essay on Critics, published in The Dial. Megan highlights Fuller’s pioneering role in shaping American literary criticism, advocating for a comprehensive approach that engages deeply with a book’s intent and context.

“They would engage with what the author themselves meant to do with the book.” [03:59]

Fuller’s editorial vision for The Dial emphasized thoughtful, contextual reviews, a novel approach in the American literary landscape of the time.

4. Transcendentalism and Fuller’s Role

Megan provides an overview of Transcendentalism, positioning Fuller alongside Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau as key figures in the movement. She describes Transcendentalism’s core beliefs in self-reliance and the divine presence in nature.

“Margaret Fuller was, in a way, you would kind of ally her with the Social reform, Transcendentalists.” [07:02]

Fuller’s alignment with social reform distinguished her from her counterparts, as she focused more on societal issues rather than purely naturalist themes.

5. Fuller’s Journalism Career

Fuller’s transition to journalism is discussed, particularly her role as a columnist for the New York Tribune. Megan explains how Fuller balanced her journalistic endeavors with her personal responsibilities, supporting her family after her father’s death.

“She became a successful professional writer, right? She actually earned a living by writing later for the New York Tribune.” [09:48]

Fuller’s contributions included book reviews, social critiques, and on-the-ground reporting, demonstrating her versatility and commitment to social issues.

6. "Woman in the 19th Century": A Landmark Work

John brings up Fuller’s seminal work, Woman in the 19th Century. Megan explains that the book emerged from Fuller’s conversations with women and her transcendentalist beliefs, advocating for expanded roles and rights for women.

“We would have every arbitrary barrier thrown down. We would have every path laid open to woman as freely as to man.” [13:45]

Fuller championed women’s access to education, professional fields, and legal rights, challenging the restrictive societal norms of her time.

7. Fuller’s Vision for Women’s Equality

Megan elaborates on Fuller’s radical vision for gender equality, emphasizing her belief in the fluidity of gender roles and the importance of individual potential.

“There is no holy masculine man, no purely feminine woman.” [17:02]

Fuller envisioned a society where both men and women could fully realize their capabilities without being confined to rigid gender stereotypes.

8. Social Activism and Compassion: Fuller’s Work with the Less Fortunate

Fuller’s compassionate journalism is highlighted, particularly her visits to Blackwell’s Island’s mental hospital and prisons. Megan discusses Fuller’s advocacy for humane treatment and rehabilitation of the marginalized.

“Find ways to offer care to them. During this time, she had become very interested in reform of women's prisons.” [20:43]

Fuller’s work underscored her commitment to social justice, challenging societal indifference towards the impoverished and incarcerated.

9. Fuller as a Foreign Correspondent in Italy

John shifts the conversation to Fuller’s role as a foreign correspondent during the Italian revolutions of 1848. Megan recounts Fuller’s passionate involvement in the Risorgimento and her personal life in Italy, including her clandestine romance and pregnancy.

“She fell in love in Italy with a younger man who she met kind of by chance.” [26:02]

Fuller’s correspondence from Italy captured the tumultuous political climate and her unwavering dedication to democratic ideals, even amidst personal turmoil.

10. The Tragic End and Legacy of Margaret Fuller

The episode moves to the harrowing account of Fuller’s shipwreck in 1850. Megan narrates the tragic circumstances leading to Fuller’s death, her decision to leave her child, and the mysterious disappearance of several passengers.

“Margaret Fuller was the only, you know, non Italian journalist in Rome, writing about what was going on.” [26:02]

The tragic end of Fuller’s life remains a poignant chapter in her legacy, symbolizing the profound sacrifices she made for her ideals and profession.

11. Megan Marshall’s Engagement with Fuller’s Legacy

Megan shares her personal journey in uncovering and celebrating Fuller’s life. Initially focused on the Peabody sisters, Megan was drawn back to Fuller due to her enduring significance and the mysteries surrounding her life and death.

“After that 20 years of research and writing... I needed kind of a new lease on life and I got that through writing about Margaret Fuller.” [34:14]

Megan’s dedication to Fuller underscores the importance of preserving and understanding the contributions of pioneering women in history.

12. The Relevance of Margaret Fuller Today

In concluding, Megan emphasizes the timeless relevance of Fuller’s work, advocating for strong female role models and the importance of immersing oneself in the lives of trailblazers to draw inspiration and lessons applicable to contemporary society.

“We need heroines. We need to know not just what they did that's so great.” [37:04]

Fuller’s writings offer valuable insights into struggles for equality, personal integrity, and societal reform, making her a vital figure for today’s readers.

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• “Pulling them all together is what makes this a great book.” — Megan Marshall [01:16]
• “They would engage with what the author themselves meant to do with the book.” — Megan Marshall [03:59]
• “Margaret Fuller was, in a way, you would kind of ally her with the Social reform, Transcendentalists.” — Megan Marshall [07:02]
• “She became a successful professional writer, right? She actually earned a living by writing later for the New York Tribune.” — Megan Marshall [09:48]
• “We would have every arbitrary barrier thrown down. We would have every path laid open to woman as freely as to man.” — Margaret Fuller [13:45]
• “There is no holy masculine man, no purely feminine woman.” — Margaret Fuller [17:02]
• “Find ways to offer care to them. During this time, she had become very interested in reform of women's prisons.” — Megan Marshall [20:43]
• “She fell in love in Italy with a younger man who she met kind of by chance.” — Megan Marshall [26:02]
• “We need heroines. We need to know not just what they did that's so great.” — Megan Marshall [37:04]

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Conclusion

This episode of The Great Books Podcast offers a comprehensive exploration of Margaret Fuller’s extensive contributions to literature, journalism, and feminist thought. Through Megan Marshall’s insightful analysis, listeners gain a deep understanding of Fuller’s enduring legacy and the profound impact of her writings on both her contemporaries and modern society.

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Subscribe and Engage:
Listen to more episodes of The Great Books Podcast by subscribing on your favorite platform. Share your thoughts and suggestions for future episodes by contacting John J. Miller via his website or Twitter @Eymiller.

Transcript

[Megan Marshall]

Foreign.

[John J. Miller]

Welcome to the Great Books Podcast. Today we'll talk about the writings of Margaret Fuller. I'm your host, John J. Miller of National Review, and you're listening to a production of National Review. This episode is sponsored by the Herzog Foundation. I'll tell you more about that in just a few minutes. Our guest is Megan Marshall, a professor of nonfiction writing at Emerson College in Boston. She's the author of several books, including Margaret Fuller A New American Life, which won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 2014. Her brand new book is Afterlives on Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart. And she's co editor of another brand new book, Margaret Fuller Collected Writings, just published by the Library of America. She joins us by zoom as we record from Hillsdale Colleges campus radio station WRFH in Michigan. Megan, welcome to the Great Books Podcast.

[Megan Marshall]

Thanks so much for having me, John. And I'm really thrilled to feature Margaret Fuller's writings on one of your Great Books podcast episodes.

[John J. Miller]

Well, me too. And so let's start off with why are the writings of Margaret Fuller, when you pull them all together, why are they a great book?

[Megan Marshall]

Well, that's a very good question because I think pulling them all together is what makes this a great book. You know, the Library of America has been around since the 1980s putting out works by very well known people. Thoreau, Hawthorne, all these friends of Margaret Fuller. And it's taken them until now to do a volume of Margaret Fuller's writings because she is such a complex person. She's someone whose life really can't be separated from her ideas and her writing. So this volume, which is put together not just by me, but by two other Fuller scholars, Noel Baker and Brigitte Bailey, one of whom specializes in editing manuscripts, literary manuscripts, the other in print journalism of the 19th century. We got together and said, how can we give the reading public general readers who are mystified by Margaret Fuller, the third person in the transcendental triumvirate? What was she like? What was she writing and what matters in her life? So there are her books, two books included in this. Some are on the Lake, so kind of experimental travelog that is also full of writing about indigenous peoples in the west, where she went, the Great Lakes and the environment, sort of even before Thoreau, she's writing about the destruction of the natural world. Then there's the book woman in the 19th century, which is the first great work of feminist criticism and analysis of our lives and our world. And then adding to that, you know, she wrote hundreds and hundreds of Columns for the New York Tribune in the 1840s and traveled to Europe during the 1848 revolutions and wrote home from there. And then we have also her wonderful letters and journals at the time. You know, she's unlike, you know, many women of her time. She published a great deal, but women also kind of reside in their letters and journals. So we selected all of these, and here you have it in one package, the Library of America edition of the Collective Writings of Margaret Fuller.

[John J. Miller]

We're going to talk about all of that Margaret Fuller and her journalism, her book reviews, her essays, her biography, her legacy and more. Megan, let's start with an essay from 1840. Margaret Fuller was born in 1810. She lived till 1850. There's an essay from 1840 called A Short Essay on Critics, published in a magazine called the Dial, which we'll get to in a moment. But what, what does this essay say? And why is it a landmark work for Margaret Fuller?

[Megan Marshall]

That's another very important question. Because Fuller was a girl and then a woman of profound literary ambition. She wasn't sure how to apply herself, given all the great learning that she had. And what she found she was quite good at was criticism. But this is the early Republic. Who's reading literary criticism? Criticism, who's reading book reviews. And this is the lead editorial in the first issue of the Dial, which is a, you know, became a very well known, the. The organ of the Transcendentalists. She was the editor, so she could put there whatever she wanted, and she put herself there, which I think is also quite extraordinary. And what she wanted to do was make a case for the importance of book reviewing, we would call it now literary criticism. And what would make good criticism. There were really very few people who took this endeavor seriously. One of them was Edgar Allan Poe, who famously was incredibly critical of pretty much everyone, but he really admired Fuller's writing. So what was she doing? She, as she was sometimes inclined to do, she made a kind of list of, or a hierarchy of kinds of reviewing. And so she said there are those who just kind of report what's in the book. Then there are some who kind of have a sympathy for what's in the book. But what she was arguing for was a comprehensive type of criticism where the reviewer would not just tell you what's there, not just say, I like it or I don't like it. They would engage with what the author themselves meant to do with the book. They would put it in the context of all other such books. They would really give you what we're now much more accustomed to seeing and after her time seeing and reading a really judicious, thoughtful review that places a book in, in its context. And that was a brand new thing for anyone to say in the U.S. i mean, maybe in Britain people were practicing criticism in this way and didn't have to feel they had to, you know, state their intent. But in America this was a new genre. And she's starting this journal, the Dial, which lasted for about four years. She was the editor for a couple years until she saw that she couldn't. There wasn't going to be any income from it. She was a self supporting woman, actually supporting her mother and younger siblings after the death of her father when she was just 25. So she couldn't go on doing it without any kind of pay and it was a lot of work. But the people she was had who had asked her to edit the Dial were Emerson, Bronson, Alcott, many disaffected Unitarian ministers who were a part of the Transcendental movement.

[John J. Miller]

So what is Transcendentalism? You've already mentioned the word a couple times. You mentioned that she was part of a three person triumvirate of Transcendentalism. So who, who were? I think I know the answer, but tell us who were the three people or who were the two in addition to Margaret Fuller? But then what is Transcendentalism?

[Megan Marshall]

Right, that, that is a tricky question. It was tricky then and tricky now. People sometimes didn't want to take on that mantle, but Fuller willingly took it. If she said, if you mean somebody who's seeking the highest form of inquiry into the nature of life and being, that was what she was proud to be associated with in terms of Transcendentalism. The other two, who we really know quite well are Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Emerson is known for his notion of self reliance, that we need to look into ourselves and be independent of mind and spirit. Another important tenet of Transcendentalism was the notion that the divine spirit was present in nature. It was a kind of universalizing force that brought everything together in nature. This brings us to Thoreau, who was, you know, the great naturalist as well. There is a whole group of people who were associated with Emerson, Thoreau and Fuller and some of them were interested in social experiment. So you hear about Brook Farm, which was a utopian community founded by some of the Transcendentalists and Margaret Fuller spent time there as well. I would say of the three, three, Margaret Fuller was, in a way, you would kind of ally her with the Social reform, Transcendentalists, because she. Although she appreciated nature, that wasn't really her thing. It was so much for Emerson and Thoreau. And her life is so different from theirs, which is another reason, you know, it was a little harder to get a grasp on her. She left Concord to go to New York City to write journalism about the difficulties and challenges and the arts and letters of New York City. She ended up in Europe, as I said, at the time of revolution. So she. She was not going to sit around and Concord, as Thoreau said, you know, I've traveled a lot in my own backyard. And Emerson wrote about how, you know, no matter where you travel, you carry your shadow, your dark burdens with you. That was not Margaret Fuller. And so she was an iconoclast in amongst these iconoclastic Transcendentalists.

[John J. Miller]

So how does this essay fit into the leg of the Dial?

[Megan Marshall]

Here she was editing all these disaffected ministers, and they could have been writing about, you know, doctrinal issues. But to have that first essay be about criticism about literature and art. She also did art criticism in that same issue. Really staked a claim for this journal as something much broader than it might have been if she were not the editor you mentioned.

[John J. Miller]

She had trouble making money as an editor of the Dial, but she did become a successful professional writer, right? She actually earned a living by writing later for the New York Tribune, but just by writing in general.

[Megan Marshall]

Well, it took a while for that income to generate itself. I think she was 35 when she went to New York and took this job at the Tribune as a front page columnist with the understanding initially that she'd be writing about literature and art and theater and drama. But she very quickly switched to or moved into the areas of social critique. Before that, she kind of cobbled together a living from a number of sources. The writing did not actually pay very much, so she taught school sometimes. She had tutoring jobs. She. She was a real prodigy of languages. So she could teach German and French and Italian and the classics if she wanted to. So she had tutorials of that sort. But most important was a dream of her own to help hold what she called conversation classes for adult women who were, you know, well read, but were not able to go to colle. They met in a. First in a friend's rented room, and then they met in the bookstore, foreign language bookstore and lending library that was founded by Elizabeth Peabody, another of the transcendentalists I've written about. Right in the middle of Boston, just a block from the common and they talked about literature, art, and what she called the great questions for women. What were we born to do and how should we do it? So these conversations, which were maybe were 20 to 30 people attending, she charged pretty high prices, and it's been calculated that she was earning, you know, per auditor of her conversations, something quite similar to what Emerson earned for his much better known lectures. She was not lecturing, though. She wanted to inculcate in women a sense of confidence in speaking, which was really not the way, you know, schools were organized at that time. You memorized things and repeated the ways you're supposed to understand or look, talk about literature. But she wanted women to think for themselves. And, you know, one of the great aspects of this, too, was it was going on these conversations as she was editing the Dial. So sometimes if she felt her students were kind of having trouble expressing themselves, she'd say, well, write an essay about this. Write about, you know, what makes a true woman. And some of those pieces ended up in the Dial as well.

[John J. Miller]

She wrote a book called Summer on the Lakes in 1843. You've already mentioned that. It's kind of travel journal, involves the Great Lakes and the people who lived there and so forth. And then in 1845, she wrote a book called Woman in the 19th Century. Of course, she was one. A woman in the 19th century, but that's the title of the book, and it might be her major work, at any rate. Megan, what is that book about? What does she say about women in the 19th century?

[Megan Marshall]

Yes. Well, this book came out of the conversations and the official conversations with women that she was conducting, and many conversations, informal ones with Emerson in particular, about, you know, marriage. What. What was. What was woman's lot to be? So woman in the 19th century is kind of trying to say, what are our opportunities? What's changing? What are the signs of the times for us? And she lived in a time when, because New England was settled first, it was overpopulated. There was just not so much opportunity for. For men to follow their professions as there had been. Many men of her generation were moving to the west, to the south, to establish themselves. Some of the ministers she was friends with ended up in St. Louis or in Kentucky. So here she was living in a world where there were many, actually many more single women than men. And the single women began to assert themselves. They began to become activists, maybe abolitionists. In her case, she was an activist for women's rights or began to be a spokesperson for women's rights.

[John J. Miller]

One of the great passages or a couple of great lines from woman in the 19th century is this quote. We would have every arbitrary barrier thrown down. We would have every path laid open to woman as freely as to man, unquote. So what did she want for women? Equality. Of what sort?

[Megan Marshall]

Well, you know, that was such a radical thing to say then, but she thought women should be able to go to colleges, women should be able to practice the professions. She sort of famously said, let them be seen. Captains, if you will, which at that time was probably, you know, the most unheard of thing you could imagine. Today we have women who are astronauts and we have women who are sea captains too, plenty of them. But then the gender roles were so strictly observed as far as what women were allowed to do. And the marriage laws were also incredibly restrictive for women that, you know, once you married, you really had no legal identity anymore. Your whatever inheritance or whatever fund, let's say you were even working, earning money. Your money was not your own, it was your husband's. And if there was a divorce, your children went, the children went with the father. It was just no question about that. And those laws were part of what she was protesting in this book. But, you know, this book also came out of her transcendentalist views. The importance of self reliance and of a fullness of being. That was her term, which I think of as kind of transcendental, that we should all be able to realize our innate talents and capabilities, all of us men and women. And she felt that marriage as it was constituted at the time, she said, was a corrupt contract. It prevented women, it stunted women, and it made, you know, marriage the most important relation in their lives. They had very little room to move outside of marriage and very little existence in the social and political and, you know, literary world. She said women need to be units before they could be in unions.

[John J. Miller]

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[Megan Marshall]

Well, that would be nice, I think, you know, I think there is a real question as to whether on the part of some in marriage, whether the both sides, both partners are able to be separate identities. Can they vote differently from each other? Can they really function as both units in a union? I think that is still a question for us. Another of her notions that was quite radical then and I think remains radical today is she felt that, as I said, everyone should be able to achieve a fullness of being. And she felt that men and women might not be so radically different. I mean, she had a sense, I think, that there were female qualities and male qualities, but a given woman might have a certain number of male qualities in her personality that she would want to be able to exert a kind of forcefulness. If you want to say forcefulness is masculine. So she said, there's no purely feminine woman, no truly masculine man. They're all flowing into each other. So she said, you know, male and female represent at the two sides of the great radical dualism. We think that they were, they are very opposite. But in fact, she says they are perpetually passing into one another. Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid. There is no holy masculine man, no purely feminine woman.

[John J. Miller]

She worked then, as you said, at the New York Tribune, owned by Horace Greeley, a famous New York publisher. Sometimes when she wrote, she didn't use her name. She had a byline. Was what an asterisk or a star? Why, what's that all about?

[Megan Marshall]

That was her choice. I think that not many of the of the pieces were bylined in the Tribune and they certainly were not in the Dial. Initially, she usually used just her initial, her initials, or sometimes just F to identify herself. So the star was her choice. I don't know whether she was. I don't think the notion of a star reporter was around yet. But people knew who she was and she was widely read. Here was another case where she, Margaret Fuller, was taking a job that normally would be assigned to a man. Horace Greeley was a free thinking fellow. He was very fond of the Brook Farm utopian community and he liked the Dial. And he saw what a brilliant mind she had and invited her to have this front page column which is quite extraordinary. And there she was working in the newsroom of the New York Tribune, along with male reporters and turning out what, you know, many book reviews, but also took up what now we might call kind of embedded journalism. Or she would go out and actually visit these places. Her idea was to go out to Blackwell's island, where there was a newly established mental hospital and a prison and an orphanage, and see what these places were like and extend the hand of care to these poor, suffering people or imprisoned people who needed to be reformed and rehabilitated, or children who'd been abandoned. She was demonstrating a kind of care that she felt all her readers should feel towards the people who were less well off than they were, as most of her readers were. I guess I meant to say that this New York Tribune, it was a daily paper in New York City, but on the weekends there was an edition that circulated through the whole country. And so she had 50,000 readers all over the country following these stories.

[John J. Miller]

This hospital on Blackwell's island that she visited is discussed in an essay called Our City Charities in the Library of America volume. There's another essay she wrote around the same time called Prevalent Idea that Politeness is Too Great a Luxury to Be Given to the Poor, which is a bulky title, but it's a really interesting piece. And it begins with an anecdote about a woman on a ferry who approaches a poorly dressed boy who's holding a baby. What happens and what's this piece about?

[Megan Marshall]

This woman is kind of a busybody that Fuller encounters on the boat. And trying to imply that this child is, you know, she asks, what's your name? Where do you live? Are you telling us the truth? And, you know, where's. Why are you out there with this baby and where's your mother and this kind of thing? And. And Fuller says, you know, give this kid a break. He's doing the best he can. And a kind of subplot here that's not really stated is that quite likely these were Irish immigrants who were so treated so poorly as they were coming to the US at the time. She wanted her readers to understand that these people they might dismiss because they were poor, because they were. Had been imprisoned, or they were having mental issues. These are people, too. These are people with souls that need to be fulfilled to the extent possible. And don't talk down to them. Don't be abusive in your speech. Don't be disrespectful. In fact, be not just polite, but find ways to offer care to them. During this time, she had become very interested in reform of women's prisons. And, of course, women imprisoned at that time were mostly prostitutes. And she thought hard about this. Why were these women in prison and not the men who were paying for sex? The men she considered the real offenders here. So she had a lot of compassion for these women. And she spent a lot of time in visiting women in these prisons and then in asylums for women where they might spend some time getting their lives back together. She would talk with them, help them find work. And she said, you know, how different is this, really? As I said, she was quite a critic of marriage as it was in those days. You know, how different is a woman who. Selling sex to support herself from a fancy woman who's putting jewels on to attract a rich husband. What is the difference? She's saying? And of course, that made. Made some people pretty angry.

[John J. Miller]

Then she became a foreign correspondent. She went overseas, best known for her work in Italy. She covered war and revolution. What'd she do abroad? Why'd she want to go?

[Megan Marshall]

Just to skip back a second to her childhood. She was a great reader, and she was always reading. You know, this is the 1810s and 20s, reading European literature before, you know, she was part of this effort to make an American literature. But she was always drawn to Europe in her imagination and had always wanted to travel there. And when her father was alive and a politician and wealthy, he'd promised he would take her there. And it never happened. Instead, the best she could do was travel west, which she turned into that book. But once she got there, she found herself at this point, woman in the 19th century had been published in England. It was well read by eminent people, and she really had an entree to anyone she wanted to meet and talk to. She met Wordsworth, she met Carlisle. And in London, there were exiles from Italy. Giuseppe Mazzini, who was the great, you know, agitator for unification of Italy and throwing off the colonizers and even for getting rid of the authority of the Pope. So she met Mazzini there. You know, she. She just became very much involved in these campaigns for democracy in Europe. And she said once she got to Italy, you know, this. This is my America. As she sensed the risorgime beginning, so there was sorgimento rising up around her. And it was, you know, for her, not just a political uprising, but she finally, after years of sometimes falling in love with maybe married men or men who couldn't give themselves to her, she fell in love in Italy with a younger man who she met kind of by chance, the first couple of days she was in Rome at the Vatican, listening to a vespers service. Just before Easter she'd gotten kind of. And this tall, handsome 10 years younger soldier in the Civic Guard, Giovanni Angelo Asoli, took her by the arm and said, are you lost? Can I take you to your, you know, where you're staying? And he did and they just, they fell in love. She was supposed to leave Rome, but she decided to stay and to just indulge in this secret romance. Nobody knew in Italy, she in Europe. She had met more women who were freer about their personal lives. And I think that gave her a sense of freedom here to. To fall in love, to have a love affair.

[John J. Miller]

And they had a baby.

[Megan Marshall]

Yes. You know, she was close to 40 and she had always had kind of what she thought of as a. Not a very strong constitution. She was given to migraines. I think she must have been absolutely astounded that she became pregnant almost instantly. And there she was writing for the Tribune, needing to support herself. The revolution is breaking out and she's pregnant. What's she gonna do? And she has to keep it a secret because, you know, scandal would have meant she'd have to give up writing the column. What would she have done? So she goes up to a hill town above Rome and is there in secret, gives birth and then leaves her baby, little Nino, also named Angelo, with a wet nurse to go back to Rome and continue to cover this rise of the Roman Republic, which she hoped so much. And her. Her partner, her lover, maybe her husband. She began to refer to him as her husband. Once they had the child and probably they did marry, or she would have wanted to marry if it was possible in this revolutionary turmoil. She could spend time with her partner, but they couldn't live together either. This is still secret. And writing these dispatches. And the Roman Republic rose up and then. And the Pope fled. But the French didn't like that. They didn't want the Pope to pose. So here comes the siege of Rome with troops from France and it was a big, big disaster. And there was Margaret Fuller, the only, you know, non Italian journalist in Rome, writing about what was going on. She says, I write to you from barricaded Rome in one of these columns. And she also took up the job of running one of the hospitals for the wounded. So she was very busy writing the columns, tending to the wounded and worrying about her little son who was up with wet nurse in Rieti, a town maybe 40 miles from Rome but a pretty long way in Those days, it's.

[John J. Miller]

Almost like she's Edward R. Murrow and she's saying, this is London. Although she's also a mom and running a hospital and doing so many things.

[Megan Marshall]

This so much speaks to why this volume is. This very varied volume of letters. You know, you don't. She's not writing about being pregnant and. And in the dispatches from Rome, although you can. Once, you know that's the case, you can kind of sense what's going on. So it was important to have letters and. And journals as well, and to really give a sense of her whole life. I think in this volume you have the whole. Margaret Fuller.

[John J. Miller]

Let's move on now to the sad ending. She leaves Italy with her family in 1850. They want to return to the United States. Go to the United States. What happens?

[Megan Marshall]

They had very little money, so they're going on a cargo ship, not a steamer liner. And it was going to take weeks and weeks, maybe months. And just as they're leaving the Mediterranean, the captain, who she thought was quite good, got smallpox and died. So suddenly, this first mate is getting them all the way to New York. And a huge storm blew up as they were approaching New York harbor and blew them off course. And this first mate had really no idea where they were. And they struck up upon the sandy shoals off of Fire island, north of the city. And they were not really that far from shore, but it was an incredibly windy, stormy night. It was dark when they came out. And Margaret Fuller and her husband didn't know how to swim. In fact, many of the crew didn't know how to swim. It was not something everybody knew how to do, so. And they could see the shore. So, you know, the ship was. Parts of it were still there. They could stay on it for, I think it was maybe a matter of 12 hours. And they saw people. As the day wore on, they saw people assembling on the beach. They thought, people are going to come rescue us, so let's wait here and not risk our lives in these waves. Some people, people did dive in and swim to shore. And when they got there, they found out these people were not in any way planning to rescue anyone. They were there to receive the goods that washed ashore. These were professional scavengers who just waited for wrecks. And after, you know, the. The ship broke up, Margaret tried to grab onto a spar to, you know, with herself. I think she handed her baby to the cook, hoping the cook could get it. And. But they. They all went down. They all went down and only Little Nino's body washed ashore. We still don't know what became of the bodies of Margaret and Giovanni Isoli and some of the other. One of the other passengers who also sank into those waves. Horace Sumner, the brother of Charles Sumner, the great abolitionist senator from Massachusetts, so vanished at sea.

[John J. Miller]

You have an amazing opening to your biography of Margaret Fuller because it begins with you describing holding in your hands a volume that was on that ship. Her body was not recovered, but this volume actually was recovered. We have a volume from the shipwreck, and you were holding your hands. What in that volume? And what was that like?

[Megan Marshall]

It's amazing to me that a paper document with writing on it could survive a shipwreck being washed ashore. Perhaps it was in a trunk that was floating. But there were a lot of letters, apparently. This is. Emerson sent Thoreau up to see if he could find. Fuller had been writing a history of the Roman Republic, and that's what they were hoping to find. They didn't find that there were papers drying in front of the fire at the one little house that was near this spot. But this was her Roman Journal. It begins in the late, late 1840s when she arrives in Naples. And she loves the fig and the olive. And there's all this, you know, enchantment with the sunny Italy. And then it takes a darker turn as the revolution comes on. And she records. And these passages are in our volume. She records viewing the assault on Rome by the French troops and her own despair as to whether this really was. Is ever going to. Will Italy ever rise again? Will Italy ever be unified? Will it ever be its own nation? And her own fear for her life, for her husband's life. And who will take care of the child? She did write to friends, a few friends in America, letting them know about her son's existence in case they were to die. And so someone would take care of this child. But she was gone. Margaret Fuller was by then one of the most famous women, American women, just barring none. And her death was mourned widely. It was sort of like, you know, Amelia Earhart going off into nothingness. Everybody wanted her back, except as they began to learn more about this scandalous love affair and the child conceived out of wedlock because she never hid that fact. Some people began to say, well, maybe this was better. Could she have been accepted in, you know, an America that was far more conventional than Europe with her lover, her husband, if he was. And this child, a bastard child, as they continued to think of this little boy.

[John J. Miller]

You wrote a Pulitzer Prize winning biography of Margaret Fuller. You also discuss her in your new book, your brand new book called After Lives. What's your story as a scholar dealing with Margaret Fuller? How did you discover her and then decide you would like to write about her?

[Megan Marshall]

When I began working in biography, there had been several books about Margaret Fuller published. This is the late 1970s and early 80s. And I started writing a book instead about the Peabody sisters who were part of the that group. One married Nathaniel Hawthorne, one married Horace Mann, and the third was this Elizabeth Peabody I mentioned with her bookshop and a rabble rouser in her own right. And I kept saying, well, everybody knows about Margaret Fuller. We have to know about these other women of Transcendentalism. And that book took me 20 years. And when it came out in 2005, I began to say sort of the same thing. Everybody knows about Margaret Fuller, but now you need to know about the Peabody sisters. But I was getting blank looks. People had forgotten Margaret Fuller. It seems to kind of periodically happen. And so I thought, well, I'm going to have to fix that. And she's the most. You'll see when you read this book. Her writing can be demanding and complex, but it's very modern and it comes from a place of the heart, from a much more forward thinking mind than the Peabodys, about whom I had with whom I'd spent 20 years researching. I'm very fond of them and that book was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize as well. But. But Margaret Fuller carried me in a time of life where I was trying to find my own footing. After that 20 years of research and writing which coincided with raising my children and I needed kind of a new lease on life and I got that through writing about Margaret Fuller. The new book, Afterlives, refers to this past several years where after I've written three big biographies, I've also written about Elizabeth Bishop, the 20th century poet, and many of the mysteries that kept absorbing me. And Margaret Fuller fits into that because as you've heard, there still are many mysteries. Did she really marry? What happened to her? Might her remains have floated ashore to some wharf down in Brooklyn? That's one of the rumors that's out there. The point of the book is that you never really leave your biographical subjects behind and you never stop being a biographer. So I began to look at my own life and the family papers that I happen to be lucky to have still in hand, particularly given that I grew up in Pasadena. And many of these papers were for many years in a little stucco bungalow in Altadena. Which actually did survive but so many houses did not. So I think all of us must feel lucky if we have any remains from our past, from our grandparents past even beyond that and save them them and write a story with them.

[John J. Miller]

One more question. What's the case for reading Margaret Fuller today?

[Megan Marshall]

We need heroines. We need to know not just what they did that's so great. Yes, she wrote this great book. Yes, she was a foreign correspondent, the first American woman foreign war correspondent. But what were their lives like? And these 19th century women left such wonderful diaries and letters. You can really get inside their minds. So this is a kind of a trip into an earlier time that also looks forward to ours. I think you can learn a lot from immersing yourself in the lives of other people who struggled and loved and persevered.

[John J. Miller]

Megan Marshall, thanks so much for joining us and telling us all about the writings of Margaret Fuller.

[Megan Marshall]

Thanks so much for having me.

[John J. Miller]

You just listened to the Great Books Podcast, a production of National Review. Please subscribe to the Great Books Podcast and leave reviews of the show that helps us keep this podcast going. Please send me your ideas for future episodes. You can reach me through my [e-mail] on Twitter. My handle is Eymiller. And last of all, special thanks to all of you for listening. We'll be back next week with an episode of the Great Books Podcast.