Waldo Emerson said that “in discourse, she was quick, conscious of power, in perfect tune with her company, and would pause and turn the stream with grace and adroitness”. Another friend, the Unitarian minister James Freeman Clarke, said that Fuller’s conversation was “Full of thoughts and full of words; capable of poetic improvisation . . . capable of clear, complete, philosophic statement, but for the strong tendency to life which melted down evermore in its lava-current the solid blocks of thought”. Fuller’s conversation was unlike anything Clarke had ever heard before; it made “our common life rich, significant and fair . . . [giving] to the hour a beauty and brilliancy which shall make it eminent long after, amid drear years of level routine!"
In Woman in the Nineteenth Century, Fuller set out to translate her conversation into writing. The book, published in 1845, ranks as the first major work of feminism by an American author. It remains a landmark in the history of women’s studies. From start to finish, it rustles with the spoken word: with dialogues, speeches by various personae, with the associative back and forth of conversation. Woman in the Nineteenth Century is as close as we can get to hearing Margaret Fuller’s voice, her inimitable speech.
She began writing it when she was thirty-three, at a time of life when most of her friends were married and had become pillars of respectability. Margaret Fuller was none of these things. Her heart was just as ambitious as her intellect, eager for conquests and partners. But she had been supremely unfortunate in love and had come to agree with her literary idol Goethe “that women who love and marry feel no need to write. But how can a woman of genius love and marry?”
Fuller wanted to be a genius and she wanted to be loved. She wanted to write, to cultivate her intellect, to feel passion, to be a mother. “I love the stern Titanic parts, I love the crag, even the Drachenfels of life”, she wrote (she was referring to the steep mountain on which Goethe’s Faust is set), “I love the roaring sea that crashes against the crag—I love its sounding cataract”. Thomas Carlyle, who met her toward the end of her life, wrote of Fuller’s insatiable hunger for experience: “Such a predetermination to eat this big universe as her oyster or her egg, and to be absolute empress of all height and glory in it that her heart could conceive, I have not before seen in any human soul”.
