Margaret Fuller: A New American Life
*Starred Review* “The mind has a light of its own,” wrote Margaret Fuller, and the radiance of her inner world vitalizes Marshall’s profoundly simpatico portrait of this path-breaking feminist and courageous journalist and writer. Marshall encountered Fuller while working on her acclaimed first book, The Peabody Sisters (2005), and she inhabits Fuller’s dramatic, oft-told story with unique intimacy by virtue of her fluency in and judicious quoting of Fuller’s extraordinarily vivid letters. Marshall conveys Fuller’s “passionate intensity,” “unusual intellect and outsized personality,” “expansive sympathy,” and extraordinary valor as she illuminates family struggles, social obstacles, and private heartache in conjunction with each phase of Fuller’s phenomenal achievements as an innovative teacher, lecturer, and editor. Marshall brings stirring historical and psychological insights to Fuller’s complicated relationship with Emerson and the other transcendentalists, her journey west and response to the horrific plight of Native Americans, her gripping dispatches on social ills as a front-page columnist for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, and her triumphs in Europe as “America’s first female foreign correspondent.” How spectacularly detailed and compassionate Marshall’s chronicle is of Fuller’s scandalous love for an Italian soldier, the birth of their son, her heroic coverage of the 1849 siege of Rome, and her and her family’s tragic deaths when their ship wrecks in sight of the American coast. A magnificent biography of a revolutionary thinker, witness, and writer. --Donna Seaman