NEWS & INTERVIEWS

MARGARET FULLER wins the Pulitzer!

Margaret Fuller mention in “By the Book”
interview with Tom Perrotta
in the New York Times Book Review


“How Megan Marshall came to write
a biography about Margaret Fuller,”
Kate Tuttle, Boston Sunday Globe

Margaret Fuller listed in Publishers Weekly
“Spring Announcements Top 10” for 2013
in the category of  Literary Biographies,
Essays, & Criticism

NPR Interview:
On Point with Tom Ashbrook,
Margaret Fuller: Journalist,
Critic, Transcendentalist

BLOG POSTS

Margaret Fuller:
A New American Life

By Megan Marshall

PRAISE | Q&A

The award-winning author of The Peabody Sisters takes a fresh look at the trailblazing life of a great American heroine—Thoreau’s first editor, Emerson’s close friend, first female war correspondent, and passionate advocate of personal liberation and political freedom.

From an early age, Margaret Fuller provoked and dazzled New England’s intellectual elite. Her famous Conversations changed women’s sense of how they could think and live; her editorship of the Transcendentalist literary journal The Dial shaped American Romanticism. Now, Megan Marshall, whose acclaimed The Peabody Sisters “discovered” three fascinating women, has done it again: no biography of Fuller has made her ideas so alive or her life so moving.

Marshall tells the story of how Fuller, tired of Boston, accepted Horace Greeley’s offer to be the New York Tribune’s front-page columnist. The move unleashed a crusading concern for the urban poor and the plight of prostitutes, and a late-in-life hunger for passionate experience. In Italy as a foreign correspondent, Fuller took a secret lover, a young officer in the Roman Guard; she wrote dispatches on the brutal 1849 Siege of Rome; and she gave birth to a son.

Yet, when all three died in a shipwreck off Fire Island shortly after Fuller’s 40th birthday, the sense and passion of her life’s work were eclipsed by tragedy and scandal. Marshall’s inspired account brings an American heroine back to indelible life.

PRAISE

"Megan Marshall’s richly researched and elegantly presented biography of Margaret Fuller reads like a novel – but with a twist. Marshall takes her cue from Hawthorne, who called his books “romances” rather than novels, in order (as he put it) to “bring out or mellow the lights and deepen and enrich the shadows of the picture” while maintaining allegiance to the “truth of the human heart.” The result is thrilling. Marshall’s keen observations and rigorous analysis are expressed in fresh, creative ways that honor her subject’s own imaginative boldness in life and art.

Marshall is keenly aware that there was little distinction between public and private in Margaret Fuller’s life. She shows how Fuller, in fact, aimed to break down such a distinction, which she felt hemmed in the lives of women. Marshall, exhilaratingly, writes Fuller’s story “from the inside out, using the most direct evidence – her words and those of her family and friends, recorded in the moment.” She provides deft and vividly sympathetic reconstructions, bolstered by newly discovered documents, of the interesting times and locales – in Cambridge, New York, and Italy—in which Fuller lived. . . .

Like all great historical works, Margaret Fuller informs us about the past as it forces us to think about our present. Fuller, who helped spark the nineteenth-century movement for women’s rights, opened a path that we still follow. Megan Marshall’s beautiful rendition of her life inspiringly links past to present, and is a classic of modern biography."
—Biography and Autobiography winners: the last 25 years – The Pulitzer Prizes

“Margaret Fuller is as seductive as it is impressive.  It has the grain and emotional amplitude of a serious novel . . . [and] pushes Ms. Marshall into the front rank of American biographers.”
—Dwight Garner, New York Times

"Many have told the story of Margaret Fuller, the Transcendentalist, feminist author and foreign correspondent who covered revolutionary Europe between 1846 and 1850. But Megan Marshall is the first to excavate from Fuller’s public and private writings the distinctive loneliness of the female public intellectual. “A lonely child” who found no intellectual match among her peers, Fuller formed strong attachments to such cultured elders as Ralph Waldo Emerson. She sought initially to write and think with them, but none could return her ferocious seriousness. She found herself obliged, in the end, to write for herself alone. Marriage was its own complicated question, though she chose it finally. Then loneliness found its answer—Fuller had a child. Marshall writes: “Margaret realized the ‘great novelty, the immense gain’ of motherhood: ‘nothing else can break the spell of loneliness.’ ” It’s rare indeed that a biography can make you weep. Marshall’s beautifully written account does exactly that."
—Danielle Allen, Wall Street Journal

“Marshall has designed her work for a general audience, and by the force of her graceful writing, and her narrative trajectory, she propels her interpretation of Fuller the individual, Fuller the woman, Fuller the activist, and Fuller the romantic into contemporary awareness and esteem.”
—Mary Kelley, New England Quarterly

“This month Megan Marshall joins the cohort of distinguished Fullerites with ‘Margaret Fuller: A New American Life.’  Marshall is a gifted storyteller steeped in the parochial society of nineteenth century-century Boston and Concord . . . There are many ways of doing justice to Fuller, and Marshall makes an eloquent case for her as a new paradigm: the single career woman, at home in a world of men, who admire her intelligence, though it turns them off; and the seeker of experience, who doesn’t want to miss out on motherhood, yet is terrified that it will compromise her work life . . . Marshall excels at creating a sense of intimacy—with both her subjects and her reader.”
— Judith Thurman, The New Yorker

“In this thoroughly absorbing, lively new biography, Megan Marshall’s sympathy for Fuller — for the dilemma she faced as a powerfully intelligent woman whose time and place repeatedly thwarted her ambitions — nearly outpaces her admiration, though the book passionately evokes both. Fuller, so often misunderstood in life, richly deserves the nuanced, compassionate portrait Marshall paints.”
—Kate Tuttle, The Boston Globe

“Megan Marshall’s ‘empathetic’ biography of Fuller analyzes with special insight the subterranean tensions that marked Fuller’s friendship with Emerson.”
—Robert Pogue Harrison, New York Review of Books

"Marshall's biography is an enlightening and absorbing portrait of a woman whose struggles and triumphs reflect the constraints of a bygone era and yet resonate today. In these pages, liberally enriched with quotations from her own vivid prose, Margaret Fuller comes to life. It's not unusual to find, at the end of a biography, that its subject meets with death. But it's rare that the reader comes upon that expected ending with tears in her eyes."
—Natalie Wexler, Washington Independent Review of Books

“The rest of the world might take it’s time arriving at equal rights, but Margaret Fuller had evened things up for herself.”
—Kathryn Harrison, New York Times Book Review

“Fascinating and well-researched . . . Marshall’s prescient reading of Fuller’s life makes this book worthy of her subject.”
—Susan Cheever, The Daily Beast

“A thorough and sympathetic treatment of the famed feminist. . . .  You can meet the resolute yet tender Margaret Fuller in the pages of Marshall’s excellent biography.” 
—Concord Monitor

“Shaping her narrative like a novel, Marshall brings the reader as close as possible to Fuller’s inner life and conveys the inspirational power she has achieved for several generations of women.”
—Elaine Showalter, The New Republic