Margaret Fuller, Wandering Pilgrim

“How is it that I seem to be this Margaret Fuller,” the pioneering feminist, journalist, and political revolutionary asked herself as a child. “What does it mean?” Filled with new insights into the causes and consequences of Fuller’s lifelong psychic conflict, this biography chronicles the journey of an American Romantic pilgrim as she wanders from New England into the larger world--and then back home under circumstances that Fuller herself likened to those of both the prodigal child of the Bible and Oedipus of Greek mythology. Meg McGavran Murray discusses Fuller’s Puritan ancestry, her life as the precocious child of a preoccupied, grieving mother and of a tyrannical father who took over her upbringing, her escape from her loveless home into books, and the unorthodox--and influential--male and female role models to which her reading exposed her. Murray also covers Fuller’s authorship of Woman in the Nineteenth Century, her career as a New-York Tribune journalist first in New York and later in Rome, her pregnancy out of wedlock, her witness of the fall of Rome in 1849 during the Roman Revolution, and her return to the land of her birth, where she knew she would be received as an outcast. Other biographies call Fuller a Romantic. Margaret Fuller, Wandering Pilgrim illustrates how Fuller internalised the lives of the heroes and heroines in the ancient and modern Romantic literature that she had read as a child and adolescent, as well as how she used her Romantic imagination to broaden women’s roles in Woman in the Nineteenth Century, even as she wandered the earth in search of a home.

Has the potential to be one of the most controversial books published on Fuller, in the best sense of the term. Murray has done her research, and her ability to contextualize Fuller in her time and among her contemporaries is outstanding. Among the book's strengths are Murray's psychological probings of Fuller, sophisticated readings of Fuller's relations with Emerson, Nathan, and Ossoli, and her relating of Fuller's reading not just to her intellectual life, but to her emotional life as well. This will be an important work.--Joel Myerson "coeditor of The Selected Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson", This impressive, scholarly biography brings to life the joyless, anxiety-ridden child, the unattractive adolescent, and the verbally brilliant young woman in her twenties, who can support herself, through her twenties and into her thirties, teaching, conversing, and writing. Amazing that this protected prodigy should spend her last few years not only in poverty but in the midst of a raging Italian revolution, with a baby she could not acknowledge or care for, and in service to an emergency hospital for wounded and dying militia. Even when we know the story, this retelling keeps us glued to the book's pages. In these pages, perhaps for the first time from a feminist point of view, we see the intellectual Margaret Fuller, the writer of the United States' first feminist manifesto, warts and all as a passionate, strong woman, fully human. One realizes, as the tragic ending closes in, how great a loss was Fuller's needless death.--Florence Howe "The City University of New York Graduate Center", While nearly every biographer has noticed Timothy Fuller's strong impact upon his daughter's personality, no one before Murray has given this father-daughter bond such a central explanatory role. . . . By necessity, this biographical approach is speculative, but--like a psychoanalyst--Murray reconstructs the "psychosexual" depths of Fuller's personality, building out of its fragments a compelling portrait of a passionate woman's development. At its finest moments, Murray's biography does an excellent job balancing Fuller's life and writing, illustrating that the personal is the political. . . . Providing an engaging map to Fuller's tangled emotional concerns, Murray's biography encourages a strong readerly identification with the suffering female, who, by the end, looks very much like the modern "career woman" attempting--in her final months in Italy--to juggle the competing demands of raising an infant son and working as a war correspondent and journalist.--Jeffrey Steele "Legacy, A Journal of American Women Writers", [Murray] deserves praise for her nuanced reading of Fuller's romantic personality. Murray's scholarship is impeccable and generous. . . . Her probing of Fuller's psychology deepens understanding of Fuller's major works. . . . Murray is especially conscious of her place in the history of Fuller criticism and biography, and this makes her biography an astute contribution to the literature on Fuller and on the development of American studies.--Choice, This fascinating biography vividly evokes the life and times of pioneering feminist Margaret Fuller. . . . Murray's sensitive consideration of this crisis at the center of Margaret Fuller's complicated life, private and public, personal and political, makes the book a real, original contribution to Fuller scholarship and brings us as readers face to face with conflicted soul, never able to resolve all the contradictions of mind and body. . . . I highly recommend this book to anyone with a serious interest in women's and gender studies.--Feminist Review

MEG McGAVRAN MURRAY, until her retirement, taught English at Mississippi State University and, before that, at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. She is the editor of the essay collection Face to Face.