General Resources

Megan Marshall’s much-awaited biography of Margaret Fuller is here!

Advance reviewers have already praised Margaret Fuller: A New American Life as “a magnificent biography,” “spectacularly detailed” and written with a “unique intimacy.”  Emerson’s biographer Robert D. Richardson writes, “this is the book Margaret Fuller would have wanted.”

Marshall tells the story of Fuller’s rise to prominence among the Transcendentalists, her vexed relationship with Ralph Waldo Emerson, the flowering of her feminism in New England and her departure for New York to write for Horace Greeley’s Tribune “at home and abroad,” leading to her love affair with Giovanni Ossoli—all with fresh insight and uncommon pathos. Synthesizing the scholarship of recent decades and drawing on her own research finds—a new record of Fuller’s famous Conversations for women, an Emerson letter describing Thoreau’s findings at the site of the fatal shipwreck, an engraving of Rome belonging to Fuller that survived the wreck—Marshall brings our great American heroine to new and vivid life.  If you loved The Peabody Sisters, Marshall’s first award-winning biography, you will love Margaret Fuller.