cover image Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life: Volume II: The Public Years

Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life: Volume II: The Public Years

Charles Capper, . . Oxford Univ., $40 (649pp) ISBN 978-0-19-506313-4

This long-awaited second volume of Capper's Bancroft Prize–winning biography of Fuller fulfills all expectations. Capper follows Fuller's increasing literary fame and her travels to the American West and to Europe; he also recovers her thinking on topics ranging from religion to "the woman question." Fuller emerges as a proto-modernist, someone who "managed to slip more completely than any other intellectual of her generation the leash of Victorian repressions and evasions." Fuller articulated a radically Transcendental critique of classical Christianity, arguing that if men and women did not interpret the Bible "by the freedom of their own souls," they would render the Bible untrue. Capper offers a nuanced and sophisticated reading of Fuller's tracts on gender, which he says have important philosophical and literary qualities. He treats Fuller's personal life as well, chronicling her struggles with finances, her relationship with Emerson and her affair with an Italian partisan 10 years her junior. Debate has raged for 150 years about whether Fuller and Giovanni Angelo Ossoli actually married or whether their son was illegitimate. Capper cautiously concludes that they likely did marry in 1848. Capper has crafted both an intimate life and a subtle analysis of Fuller's work. 36 b&w illus. (May)