My Heart Is a Large Kingdom

This single-volume selection of the letters of Margaret Fuller affords a unique opportunity for renewed acquaintance with a great American thinker of the Transcendentalist circle. The letters represent Fuller at all stages of her life and career, and show her engaged as literary critic, as translator and as champion of German literature and thought, as teacher, as travel writer, as literary editor, as journalist, as feminist, as revolutionary, as wife and mother. "My Heart Is a Large Kingdom," unlike previous collections, includes only letters transcribed from Fuller's manuscripts and does not reproduce correspondence known only from printed sources and copies in hands other than Fuller's.Among the recipients of the letters in this generous selection are such literary and cultural figures as Bronson Alcott, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Arthur Hugh Clough, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Giuseppe Mazzini, Giovanni Angelo Ossoli (Fuller's husband), George Ripley, and Henry David Thoreau. Taken together, the letters serve as a chronicle of Fuller's lifetime and provide glimpses into her thoughts and feelings during the years of the "Conversations," Dial, and the revolution in Rome.

A splendid selection of letters., Hudspeth's clever spirit rapping serves to remind us that Fuller remains obscure not only to most American citizens but also to many serious scholars of American literature.... Only scholarship as ambitious and accomplished as Hudspeth's can restore Fuller's place in what Emerson called an 'essential line of American history.', In My Heart is a Large Kingdom: Selected Letters of Margaret Fuller, Hudspeth has carved an elegant single volume of letters out of the complete and authoritative six that he has already edited. Hudspeth is a scholar's scholar: meticulous, unobtrusive, indefatigable. And in My Heart is a Large Kingdom, he reveals that he also has a novelist's eye.... Thanks to Hudspeth's scrupulous edition, it is easier to meet the private Fuller than ever before., This selection of letters draws a comprehensive and balanced picture of the transcendentalist... Robert N. Hudspeth provides very brief and exceedingly helpful biographical sketches of the correspondents... This volume is an excellent alternative for academic and public libraries that were unable to afford the larger work., Hudspeth's selection of Margaret Fuller's letters is likely to win her new readers and admirers.... 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.

Robert N. Hudspeth is Professor of English at the University of Redlands. He is the author of Ellery Channing and the editor of the six-volume Letters of Margaret Fuller, also available from Cornell, from which this selection is drawn.