page_title: Margaret Fuller
section_title: Assignment in Europe
hierarchical_section_title: Margaret Fuller / Biography / Assignment in Europe
caption_attribution_description: Italiano: Chiesa di San Nicola - Rieti, Lazio, Italia English: Saint Nicholas church - Rieti, Lazio, Italia
context_page_description: Sarah Margaret Fuller Ossoli was an American journalist, editor, critic, translator, and women's rights advocate associated with the American transcendentalism movement. She was the first American female war correspondent, writing for Horace Greeley's New-York Tribune, and full-time book reviewer in journalism. Her book Woman in the Nineteenth Century is considered the first major feminist work in the United States.
  Born Sarah Margaret Fuller in Cambridge, Massachusetts, she was given a substantial early education by her father, Timothy Fuller, who died in 1835 due to cholera. She later had more formal schooling and became a teacher before, in 1839, she began overseeing her Conversations series: classes for women meant to compensate for their lack of access to higher education. She became the first editor of the transcendentalist journal The Dial in 1840, which was the year her writing career started to succeed, before joining the staff of the New York Tribune under Horace Greeley in 1844. By the time she was in her 30s, Fuller had earned a reputation as the best-read person in New England, male or female, and became the first woman allowed to use the library at Harvard College.
context_section_description: In 1846 the New York Tribune sent Fuller to Europe, specifically England and Italy, as its first female foreign correspondent. She traveled from Boston to Liverpool in August on the Cambria, a vessel that used both sail and steam to make the journey in ten days and sixteen hours. Over the next four years she provided the Tribune with thirty-seven reports. She interviewed many prominent writers including George Sand and Thomas Carlyle—whom she found disappointing because of his reactionary politics, among other things. George Sand had previously been an idol of hers, but Fuller was disappointed when Sand chose not to run for the French National Assembly, saying that women were not ready to vote or to hold political office. Fuller was also given a letter of introduction to Elizabeth Barrett by Cornelius Mathews, but did not meet her at that time, because Barrett had just eloped with Robert Browning.
  In England in the spring of 1846, she met Giuseppe Mazzini, who had been in exile there from Italy since 1837. Fuller also met the Roman patriot Giovanni Angelo Ossoli, a marquis belonging to a noble family not particularly rich (but not poor) who worked as an employee at an uncle's commercial office and at the same time volunteered in the Civic Guard corps (then National Guard). Fuller and Ossoli moved in together in Florence, Italy, likely before they were married, though whether they ever married is uncertain. Fuller was originally opposed to marrying him, in part because of the difference in their religions; she was Protestant and he was Roman Catholic. Emerson speculated that the couple was "married perhaps in Oct. Nov. or Dec" of 1847, though he did not explain his reasoning. Biographers have speculated that the couple married on April 4, 1848, to celebrate the anniversary of their first meeting but one biographer provided evidence they first met on April 1 during the ceremony called "Lavanda degli Altari" (Altars Lavage). By the time the couple moved to Florence, they were referred to as husband and wife, though it is unclear if any formal ceremony took place. It seems certain that at the time their child was born, they were not married. By New Year's Day 1848, she suspected that she was pregnant but kept it from Ossoli for several weeks. Their child, Angelo Eugene Philip Ossoli, was born in early September 1848 and nicknamed Angelino. The couple was very secretive about their relationship but, after Angelino suffered an unnamed illness, they became less so. Fuller informed her mother about Ossoli and Angelino in August 1849 in a letter that explained that she had kept silent so as not to upset her "but it has become necessary, on account of the child, for us to live publicly and permanently together." Her mother's response suggests that she was aware that the couple was not legally married. She was nevertheless happy for her daughter, writing: "I send my first kiss with my fervent blessing to my grandson."
  The couple supported Giuseppe Mazzini's movement for the establishment of a Roman Republic proclaimed on February 9, 1849 after it had been voted by the Constituent Assembly, elected by male universal suffrage in January 1849. The fundamental decree of the Roman Republic stated: "Art. 1. - The Pope has lapsed in fact and in law from the temporal government of the Roman State. Art. 2. —- The Roman Pontiff will have all the necessary guarantees for independence in the exercise of his spiritual power. Art. 3 - The form of the government of the Roman state will be pure democracy, and will take on the glorious name of Roman Republic. Art. 4. - The Roman Republic will have with the rest of Italy the relations required by the common nationality." The Pope resisted this statement and asked for international intervention to be restored in his temporal power, and France was the first to respond to his appeal and put Rome under siege. Ossoli fought on the ramparts of the Vatican walls while Fuller volunteered at two supporting hospitals.  When the patriots they supported met defeat, they believed safer to flee Rome and decided t
caption: The house in Rieti, Italy where Margaret Fuller lived and gave birth to her son (the one on the left side of the arch, not where the plaque has been placed).
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