2014 Pulitzer Prize citation forMargaret Fuller: A New American Life, by Megan Marshall "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." "Megan Marshall's brilliant Margaret Fuller brings us as close as we are ever likely to get to this astonishing creature. She rushes out at us from her nineteenth century, always several steps ahead, inspiring, heartbreaking, magnificent." — Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, author of Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity "Megan Marshall gives new meaning to close reading—from words on a page she conjures a fantastically rich inner life, a meld of body, mind, and soul. Drawing on the letters and diaries of Margaret Fuller and her circle, she has brought us a brave, visionary, sensual, tough-minded intellectual, a ‘first woman’ who was unique yet stood for all women. A masterful achievement by a great American writer and scholar.” — Evan Thomas, author of Ike’s Bluff: President Eisenhower’s Secret Battle to Save the World "Megan Marshall’s Margaret Fuller: A New American Life is the best single volume ever written on Fuller. Carefully researched and beautifully composed, the book brings Fuller back to life in all her intellectual vivacity and emotional intensity. Marshall’s Fuller overwhelms the reader, just as Fuller herself overwhelmed everyone she met. A masterpiece of empathetic biography, this is the book Fuller herself would have wanted. You will not be able to put it down." — Robert D. Richardson, author of Emerson: The Mind on Fire "Fuller’s was a great life, flush with drama, and Megan Marshall’s new biography rises to it in ways small and large . . . This one pitches Ms. Marshall into the front rank of American biographers . . . 'Margaret Fuller' is as seductive as it is impressive . . . In Ms. Marshall, Fuller has found what feels like her ideal biographer." -- New York Times "A lively, intuitive study of a remarkable American character.” — Kirkus Reviews "The book's success comes from the way that Marshall allows the read —
About the Author
Megan Marshall is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life, and Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast. In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, her work has been awarded the Francis Parkman Prize, the Mark Lynton History Prize, and the BIO Award, the highest honor given by the Biographers International Organization to a writer who has advanced the art and craft of biography. Marshall is Charles Wesley Emerson Professor of writing, literature, and publishing at Emerson College.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Dear father it is a heavy storm i hope you will not have to come home in it.” So begins the record of a life that will end on a homeward journey in another heavy storm, a life unusually full of words, both spoken and written.
Sarah Margaret Fuller is six years old when she writes this brief letter on a half-sheet of paper saved by the devoted and exacting father who receives it, next by his widow, then by their descendants. Which one of them thinks to label it “First letter”? All of her survivors understand that there are, or will be, biographers, historians, students of literature who care to know.
But first it is the father who treasures his daughter’s message of concern, this lurching unpunctuated parade of runes, from the moment he unfolds the page — a father nearing forty and eager to set his young daughter, already an apt pupil, to a “severe though kind” education. And the mother, just twenty-one at her daughter’s birth, only twenty-seven now: she is known to find any words her firstborn child scribbles on bits of paper “original,” worthy of preservation. At seven, the little girl — a tall little girl with plain looks and auburn hair, whose height and imperious manner set her apart from her age mates — writes again to her father, Timothy Fuller, a brash and for the moment successful lawyer in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a U.S. congressman whose career in politics takes him away to Washington half the year, in winter and spring. It is January of 1818. In the new year, the girl’s concern for her father has transmuted into the desire to earn his good opinion — and so into more words, into the wish to show off her inquiring mind.
“I have learned all the rules of Musick but one,” she writes now in a fine spidery script, and “I have been reviewing Valpy’s Chronology” (a verse narrative of ancient and English history). And: “I should have liked to have been with you to have seen the pictures gallery at NYork.”
Sarah Margaret’s claims of accomplishment, her carefully worded wish to join Timothy in New York, are meant to forestall what she has already come to expect from her overbearing father: the torrent of criticism — of her penmanship, of her rate of progress through his curriculum, of her “stile” of expression, as he prefers to spell the word — all intended to bring his precocious daughter “as near perfection as possible.” Timothy, proud to have been a “high scholar” at Harvard, has been her only teacher, starting her on Latin at age six, requiring that she recite her lessons only to him during his months at home, insisting she be kept awake until his return from work to stand before him on his study carpet late at night, her nerves “on the stretch” until she has finished repeating to him what she had learned that day. Already she has experienced more severity than kindness in her father’s pedagogy.
And so the anxious, eager-to-please seven-year-old Sarah Margaret Fuller apologizes to her father, a man with “absolutely no patience” for mistakes, as she will to no one else in the voluminous correspondence that follows after this second letter: “I do not write well at all,” and “I have written every day a little but have made but little improvement.” And: “I hope to make greater proficiency in my Studies.”
But the verbs tell all — she has learned and reviewed, she would like to see and to make improvement. These verbs are hers. The nouns also: music, art, chronology (the unfolding of world events, the progress of society). These are her concerns, her aims, her occupations at age seven. And they will remain so for the girl who, to her father’s and her own dismay, struggles through years of singing lessons, unable to shine at this one accomplishment. “To excel in all things should be your constant aim; mediocrity is obscurity,” Timothy will prod when he offers to buy her a piano. But she continues to write every day that she has paper and pen to hand, except in times of sickness, until she becomes a woman. And then too, when she will write of music, art, literature, politics, and travel for a nation of readers. She takes her father’s cue, embraces the discipline: she refuses to be mediocre, to be obscure.
The seven-year-old girl must stop writing this second letter, however, a letter that announces her intellect to her father even by way of apology, because her mother — Margarett Crane Fuller — has asked her to “hold the baby,” a new little brother, William Henry, the second after brother Eugene. Three-year-old Eugene “speaks of you sometimes,” the girl tells her father, but he is not old enough to write — or to hold the baby, which he would not have been asked to do anyway, as a boy. Sarah Margaret must hold the baby while her mother, Margarett — a head taller than her bluff, domineering husband, with a slender, elfin beauty; sweet-tempered, but not a woman of letters — writes her own letter to Timothy.
Baby, little brother, elder sister, mother, all crowd around a writing desk with the absent Timothy foremost in their minds — his demanding presence felt across the miles. Missing from this tableau is Julia Adelaide, the “soft, graceful and lively” much-adored second-born daughter who died four years ago, just past her first birthday, when Sarah Margaret was three years old. The abrupt loss, the never-forgotten moment when the baby’s nurse, tears streaming, pulled Sarah Margaret into the nursery to view her sister’s tiny corpse in all its “severe sweetness,” shocked the older girl into consciousness. “My first experience of life was one of death,” she will write years later — so that even now, as she takes her infant brother in her arms and cedes the pen to her mother, she feels alone.
“She who would have been the companion of my life” was “severed from me”: Julia Adelaide might have been Sarah Margaret’s ally in their father’s more “severe” than “kind” school. Julia Adelaide’s death too was far more “severe” than “sweet,” for in the following months Margarett was also severed — or withdrew — from Sarah Margaret, growing “delicate” in health as her grief turned to depression. The sorrowing mother spent hours in her garden, working the flower beds or simply sitting among the fragrant roses, fruit trees, and clematis vines, turned away from her living daughter. And then the brothers came, first Eugene and then William Henry. In dreams, Sarah Margaret sees herself joining a procession of mourners “in their black clothes and dreary faces,” following her mother to her grave as she already has her sister. She has been told, but does not remember, that she begged “with loud cries” that Julia Adelaide not be put into the ground. She wakes to find her pillow wet with tears. Two years later, Sarah Margaret starts again: “My dear father.” By now, January 16, 1820, she has written many more letters to Timothy, signed them “Your affectionate daughter, Sarah M Fuller” or “S M Fuller” or “Sarah-Margaret Fuller.” She has sent him compositions in which “I assure you I . . . made almost as many corrections as your critical self would were you at home.” Obedient to Timothy alone (her mother finds her difficult, “opinionative”), she has let him know she is translating Oliver Goldsmith’s long poem of rural decline, The Deserted Village, into Latin, as he has asked; she is pushing herself through the Aeneid in answer to his challenge — wasn’t she yet “profoundly into” the work? Within six months she will have puzzled out the entire savage-heroic tale in the original Latin.
It is a greater pleasure, almost easy, for the girl to accomplish such intellectual feats during the half-year her father is away. Even though she quarrels with Margarett, is unable to feel her love, she will at times, whether to imitate her mother or to seek her mother’s distilled essence or simply to please herself, sit alone in the garden, at ease among the violets, lilies, and roses: “my mother’s hand had planted them, and they bloomed for me.” Like Persephone, she is free above ground during the two seasons her father is away, when her mother’s “flower-like nature” prevails, when she need answer only to Timothy’s exhorting letters.
In this third letter she begins to test Timothy’s strictures. Twice before she has written asking his permission to read an Italian thriller, Zeluco, and twice she has recommended for his own reading a novel — “Do not let the name novel make you think it is either trifling or silly,” she urges — called Hesitation: or, To Marry, or Not to Marry? In the pages of Hesitation she has encountered, along with the novel’s pair of indecisive lovers, the extraordinary comtesse de Pologne, a witty conversationalist, happily single, with the “power to disengage herself from the shackles of custom, without losing one attribute of modesty”: a woman whose personal magnetism draws both men and women to her circle. Does she hope Timothy will find the comtesse too and approve?
Sarah Margaret is writing fiction herself, “a new tale called The young satirist,” she tells her father, in the loose rolling hand she has acquired only recently, which will be recognizably hers from now on. Despite Timothy’s criticisms, she is beginning to feel how bright she is, even brilliant, a commanding presence in her mind’s eye, if not in daily life — the tall girl will soon reach five feet two inches and stop growing, becoming short, plump, and awkward as an adolescent. She too can play the critic, the provocateur, the “young satirist,” when she wishes. She is nine years old. Her mother, Margarett, just thirty, is newly pregnant with a fifth child. She closes her letter: P S I do not like Sarah, call me Margaret alone, pray do!
