Margaret Fuller (1810-1850)

Literary criticism and analysis for Margaret Fuller. Introduction, biography, and scholarly commentary for Fuller. Literaryhistory.com is a not-for-profit guide to reliable online information on canonical English and American writers, with links to offsite, free and subscription-service reference materials. The articles and books below were written by authorities on Margaret Fuller, and originally published in academic textbooks, peer-reviewed scholarly journals, web sites of professional and scholarly societies, and respected academic presses.


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Introduction & Biography

Myerson, Joel. "Margaret Fuller." A short introduction to Fuller from a college textbook, the Heath Anthology of American Literature.

"Margaret Fuller." Biography of Fuller. Also "Margaret Fuller's Conversations." Brief description of Fuller's intellectual discussion groups, beginning in 1839, and their influence on the first American feminists. American Transcendentalism Web, ed. Ann Woodlief. Academic web site.

Cole, Phyllis. "What Margaret Fuller Did For Feminism." A talk given in Elizabeth Palmer Peabody's former bookstore, 13 West Street, Boston, on 25 May 2011, for the Margaret Fuller Bicentennial [text].

Gornick, Vivian. "A Double Inheritance: On Margaret Fuller." The Nation 3 April 2012.

"Margaret Fuller." A biography of Margaret Fuller that provides details about her Unitarian parentage and family (her father was a Harvard-educated Unitarian). From the Unitarian Universalist Association.

Howe, Julia Ward. Margaret Fuller (1883). An early biography of Fuller by the famous nineteenth-century abolitionist and feminist Julia Ward Howe [complete book, free at Project Gutenberg]. Also, Prof. Gary Williams' commentary on Howe's biography.


Literary Criticism

Albert, Judith Strong. "Margaret Fuller's Row at the Greene Street School: Early Female Education in Providence, 1837-1839." Rhode Island History 42 (Feb. 1983) [click arrow to advance to page 4].

Avallone, Charlene. "What American Renaissance? The Gendered Genealogy of a Critical Discourse." PMLA 112, 5 (Oct. 1997) pp 1102-1120 [jstor free article].

Baker, Anne. "'A Commanding View': Vision and the Problem of Nationality in Fuller's Summer on the Lakes." ESQ 44, 1/2 Special Margaret Fuller Issue (1998) pp 61-77 [summary only, scroll down for Baker]

Bean, Judith Mattson. "'A Presence among Us': Fuller's Place in Nineteenth-Century Oral Culture." ESQ 44, 1/2 Special Margaret Fuller Issue (1998) pp 79-123 [summary only, scroll down for Bean]

Bean, Judith Mattson. "Texts from Conversation: Margaret Fuller's Influence on Emerson." Studies in the American Renaissance 1994, Joel Myerson, ed., pp 227-44 [preview/purchase, jstor].

Belasco, Susan. "'The Animating Influences of Discord': Margaret Fuller in 1844." Legacy 20, 1/2 (2000) pp 79-93 [substantial excerpt, muse].

Berthold, Dennis. "Response to Larry J. Reynolds, 'Subjective Vision, Romantic History, and the Return of the 'Real': The Case of Margaret Fuller and the Roman Republic.'" South Central Review 21, 1 (Spring 2004) pp 18-21 [substantial extract, muse].

Blanchard, Paula. Sarah Orne Jewett: Her World and Her Work (Addison-Wesley 1994) [sub ser, questia].

Blanchard, Paula. "Corinne and the 'Yankee Corinna': Madame de Staël and Margaret Fuller." In Avriel H. Goldberger, ed., Woman as Mediatrix: Essays on Nineteenth-Century European Women Writers (Oxford UP 1997) pp 39-46 [sub ser, questia].

Boggs, Colleen Glenney. "Margaret Fuller's American Translation." American Literature 76, 1 (March 2004) pp 31-58 [excerpt, muse].

Braun, Frederick Augustus. Margaret Fuller and Goethe; the development of a remarkable personality, her religion and philosophy, and her relation to Emerson, J. F. Clarke and transcendentalism (1910) [complete book, free at the Internet Archive.]

Capper, Charles. Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life Vol. 1 (Oxford UP 1992) [complete book, sub ser, questia] Also at ACLS humanities e-books, with linked reviews. Reviewed at the London Review of Books.

Capper, Charles. "Margaret Fuller as Cultural Reformer: The Conversations in Boston." American Quarterly 39, 4 (Winter 1987) pp 509-528 [preview/purchase, jstor].

Chevigny, Bell Gale. "Introduction" to The Woman and the Myth: Margaret Fuller's Life and Writings (Rev. ed., Northeastern UP 1994) [sub ser, enotes].

Chevigny, Bell Gale. "Daughters Writing: Toward a Theory of Women's Biography." Feminist Studies 9, 1 (Spring 1983) pp 79-102 [preview/purchase, jstor].

Chevigny, Bell Gale. "To the Edges of Ideology: Margaret Fuller's Centrifugal Evolution." American Quarterly 38, 2 (Summer 1986) pp 173-201 [preview/purchase, jstor].

Cole, Phyllis. "The Nineteenth-Century Women's Rights Movement and the Canonization of Margaret Fuller." ESQ 44, 1/2 Special Margaret Fuller Issue (1998) pp 1-33 [summary only]

Cole, Phyllis. "Stanton, Fuller, and the Grammar of Romanticism." New England Quarterly 73, 4 (Dec. 2000) pp 1-33 [preview/purchase, jstor]

Gatta, John. "The Virginal Soul of Margaret Fuller's Woman in the Nineteenth Century." In American Madonna: Images of the Divine Woman in Literary Culture (Oxford UP 1997) pp 33-52 [sub ser, questia].

Kolodny, Annette. "Inventing a Feminist Discourse: Rhetoric and Resistance in Margaret Fuller's Woman in the Nineteenth Century." New Literary History 25, 2 (Spring 1994) pp 355-82 [preview/purchase, jstor].

Mitchell, Thomas R. A review and summary, by Margaret B. Moore, of Mitchell's Hawthorne's Fuller Mystery" (U of Massachusetts P 1998). American Literature 72, 2 (June 2000) pp 420-21 [muse].

Mitchell, Thomas R. "Julian Hawthorne and the 'Scandal' of Margaret Fuller." American Literary History 7 (Summer 1995) pp 210-33 [preview/purchase, jstor].

Müller, Monika. A review of Kimberly VanEsveld Adams Our Lady of Victorian Feminism: The Madonna in the Work of Anna Jameson, Margaret Fuller, and George Eliot (Ohio UP 2001). Mediating Gender 2 (2002).

Packer, Barbara L. "Dangerous Acquaintances: The Correspondence of Margaret Fuller and James Freeman Clarke." Packer begins briskly: "The correspondence of Margaret Fuller and James Freeman Clarke, which began early in 1830 and lasted almost to the end of Fuller's life, was a determined experiment in conducting friendship across gender lines." ELH 67, 3 (Fall 2000) pp 808-18 [substantial extract, muse].

Pochmann, Henry A. German Culture in America: Philosophical and Literary Influences 1600-1900 (U of Wisconsin P 1957) [complete book, free at the Internet Archive].

Reynolds, Larry J. "Subjective Vision, Romantic History, and the Return of the 'Real': The Case of Margaret Fuller and the Roman Republic." South Central Review 21, 1 (Spring 2004) pp 1-17 [substantial extract, muse].

Reynolds, Larry J. "Prospects for the Study of Margaret Fuller." Prof. Reynolds considers the current state of Fuller criticism. Resources for American Literary Study 26, 2 (2000) pp 139-58 [substantial extract, muse].

Robinson, David M. "Margaret Fuller and the Transcendental Ethos: Woman in the Nineteenth Century." PMLA 97, 1 (Jan. 1982) pp 83-98 [jstor free article].

Rouse, Joy P. "Margaret Fuller: A Rhetoric of Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century America." In Oratorical Culture in Nineteenth-Century America," Gregory Clark and S. Michael Halloran, eds. (Southern Illinois UP 1993) pp 110-36 [complete book, sub ser, questia].

Rowe, John Carlos. "Hawthorne's Ghost in Henry James's Italy: Sculptural Form, Romantic Narrative, and the Function of Sexuality." Margaret Fuller as a link between Henry James and the fiction of Nathaniel Hawthorne. The Henry James Review 20, 2 (Spring 1999) pp 107-34 [excerpt, muse].

Saloman, Ora Frishberg. "Margaret Fuller on Musical Life in Boston and New York, 1841-1846." American Music 6 (1988) pp 428-41 [preview/purchase, jstor].

Sattelmeyer, Robert. Thoreau's Reading: A Study in Intellectual History with Bibliographical Catalogue (Princeton UP 1988) [complete book, free digital copy].

Shealy, Daniel. "Margaret Fuller and Her 'Maiden': Evelina Metcalf's 1838 School Journal." Studies in the American Renaissance 1996 [preview/purchase, jstor].

Shuffelton, Frank. "Margaret Fuller at the Greene Street School: The Journal of Evelina Metcalf." Studies in the American Renaissance 1985 [preview/purchase, jstor].

Steele, Jeffrey. Transfiguring America: Myth, Ideology, and Mourning in Margaret Fuller's Writing (U of Missouri P 2001) [complete book, sub ser, questia].

Steele, Jeffrey. "'Freeing the Prisoned Queen': The Development of Margaret Fuller's Poetry." Studies in the American Renaissance 1992 pp 137-75 [sub ser, enotes].

Strauch, Carl F. "Hatred's Swift Repulsions: Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Others." Studies in Romanticism 7, 2 (1968) pp 65-103 [first page only, blurred, jstor].

Tonkovich, Nicole. "Traveling in the West, Writing in the Library: Margaret Fuller's Summer on the Lakes." Legacy 10, 2 (1993) pp 79-102 [preview/purchase, jstor].

von Frank, Albert J. "Life as Art in America: The Case of Margaret Fuller." Studies in the American Renaissance (1981) pp 1-26 [preview/purchase, jstor].

von Mehren, Joan. Minerva and the Muse: A Life of Margaret Fuller (U of Mass. P 1994) [complete book, sub ser, questia].

Zwarg, Christina. Feminist Conversations: Fuller, Emerson, and the Play of Reading (Cornell UP 1995). On her social and political views and those of Ralph Waldo Emerson [complete book, sub ser, questia].


Web Sites

The Margaret Fuller Society. Select "Articles" to read selections from the Fuller Society Newsletter. "Margaret Fuller and American cultural critique" summarizes papers presented at a 1995 conference. Selected Bibliography for Margaret Fuller, compiled by Larry J. Reynolds.

Margaret Fuller Family Papers. Description of the Margaret Fuller papers at Houghton Library. Harvard Univ. library entry. Also, finding aid for Margaret Fuller papers at the Boston Public Library.

The Dial a magazine for literature, philosophy, and religion. Margaret Fuller; Ralph Waldo Emerson; George Ripley, eds. Vol. 1-4, 1840-1844. Page views of rpt. edition, free from HathiTrust Digital Library.

Making of America. A digital, searchable library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction. U Michigan and Cornell U.

American Literature. Academic journal considered "the preeminent periodical in its field," currently (11/13/12) has a "most read articles" page, listing the fifty most often accessed articles for the previous month. Users may view, for free, the full-text of all those articles. Very generous and enlightened!


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