Born in Cambridgeport (now part of Cambridge), Massachusetts, on May 23, 1810, Sarah Margaret Fuller was an extremely precocious child. Under the severe tutelage of her father she more than compensated for the inaccessibility of formal education to females of the time, but while she acquired wide learning at a very early age, the strain permanently impaired her health. She taught school for a number, of years╤for one, 1836╨1837, at Bronson Alcott╒s Temple School in Boston╤and wrote occasional critical essays for the Western Messenger. Important friendships formed in this period included those with Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Ellery Channing, Elizabeth Peabody, Theodore Parker, and Orestes Brownson. In 1839, settling in the then-suburban Jamaica Plain, she began a series of public ╥conversations╙ in Boston intended to further the education of women. A brilliant conversationalist, she enjoyed great success, and the series was repeated yearly until 1844. In 1840, as a result of her close association with Emerson and the Concord circle, she became editor of the Transcendentalist magazine, the Dial, to which she contributed a considerable number of essays, reviews, and poems. She gave up the editorship in 1842.
Fuller╒s first book, on a western tour with James Freeman Clarke and his sister, was Summer on the Lakes, in 1843, 1844. In 1844 Horace Greeley invited her to become the literary critic for the New York Tribune, and during the next two years she established herself as the leading American critic of the time. In 1845 she published her pioneering and classic feminist work, Woman in the Nineteenth Century. The following year a collection of her essays was published as Papers on Literature and Art. Shortly thereafter she sailed for Europe, where, her reputation having preceded her, she met and mingled with the leading literary figures. Her letters to the Tribune, written by the first American woman to work as a foreign correspondent, were later collected in At Home and Abroad, 1856.
In Rome in 1847 Fuller met the Marchese Angelo Ossoli, an impoverished Italian nobleman and ardent republican. They became lovers and were married, secretly, apparently in 1849. They both became deeply involved in the revolution of 1848╨1849 in Italy, led by Giuseppe Mazzini, whom she had met earlier in England. When the revolutionary Roman republic was crushed in July 1849 they fled to Rieti and thence to Florence, and there she wrote a history of the episode. In May 1850 she sailed with her husband and their child for the United States. On July 19 the ship was wrecked off Fire Island, New York, and all aboard perished. Her memoirs, edited by Emerson, Clarke, and W. H. Channing, were published in 1852, and in 1859 another collection of her essays appeared as Life Without and Life Within. Most of her writings have not withstood the passage of time, but she is nonetheless remembered for her sheer brilliance, her determination to win her place, and not least for her vivid if demanding personality and the friendships she worked tirelessly to make fruitful.
fstyl ` ! ¬ 5¬ 5¬ ? !I K !I ^ !I ═ !I ▐ ▐ !I ÿ !I £ !I 5¬ !I i !I à !I ╫ !I τ !I î !I ½ !I φ !I !I ¼ !I │ !I !I ' !I 1 5¬ 2 !I : !I O !I P !I V !I link ` HYPR ═ ▐
