Margaret Fuller Quotes

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.” ― Margaret Fuller

If you have knowledge , let others light their candles in it.

Men for the sake of getting a living forget to live.

Very early, I knew that the only object in life was to grow.

Nature provides exceptions to every rule.

There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.

I am suffocated and lost when I have not the bright feeling of progression.

The especial genius of women I believe to be electrical in movement, intuitive in function, spiritual in tendency.

There are noble books but one wants the breath of life sometimes.

Let every woman, who has once begun to think, examine herself

Harmony exists no less in difference than in likeness, if only the same key-note govern both parts.

Reverence the highest, have patience with the lowest. Let this day's performance of the meanest duty be thy religion. Are the stars too distant, pick up the pebble that lies at thy feet, and from it learn the all.

What concerns me now is that my life be a beautiful, powerful, in a word, a complete life of its kind.

What a difference it makes to come home to a child!

Male and female represent the two sides of the great radical dualism. But in fact they are perpetually passing into one another. Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid. There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman... Nature provides exceptions to every rule.

I now know all the people worth knowing in America and I find no intellect comparable to my own.

Beware of over-great pleasure in being popular or even beloved. As far as an amiable disposition and powers of entertainment make you so, it is a happiness; but if there is one grain of plausibility, it is poison.

Over time, I came to realize that this was the point of reading Emerson and, for that matter, Thoreau and Margaret Fuller and all the rest of them. The reason to read the American Transcendentalists wasn’t to hang on to their every word, but to be inspired by them. This early American philosophy was about inspiration, about moving beyond the inert and deadening ways of the past. *

All around us lies what we neither understand nor use. Our capacities, our instincts for this our present sphere are but half developed. Let us confine ourselves to that till the lesson be learned; let us be completely natural; before we trouble ourselves with the supernatural. I never see any of these things but I long to get away and lie under a green tree and let the wind blow on me. There is marvel and charm enough in that for me.

...above all things; to remember that hypocrisy is the most hopeless as well as the meanest of crimes...

But her eye, that torch or the soul, is untamed, and in the intensity of her reading, we see a soul invincibly young in faith and hope.

Our capacities, our instincts for this our present sphere are but half developed. Let us be completely natural; before we trouble ourselves with the supernatural.

We have waited here long in the dust; we are tired and hungry; but the triumphal procession must appear at last.

Accursed be he who willingly saddens an immortal spirit---doomed to infamy in later, wiser ages, doomed in future stages of his own being to deadly penance, only short of death.

Frost interviewing Noel Coward and Margaret Mead. Sir Noel's view of life is Sir Noel. Mead's mind is large and open, like Buckminster Fuller's. She found thoughts dull that suggest that men are superior to animals or plants.

If you have knowledge, let others light their candles at it.

But the intellect, cold, is ever more masculine than feminine; warmed by emotion, it rushes towards mother earth, and puts on the forms of beauty.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader. If you have knowledge, let others light their candles in it. Very early I knew that the only objective in life was to grow

Yet, by men in this country, as by the Jews, when Moses was leading them to the promised land, everything has been done that inherited depravity could do, to hinder the promise of Heaven from its fulfilment. The cross, here as elsewhere, has been planted only to be blasphemed by cruelty and fraud.

I’ll never forget that Depression Easter Sunday. Our son was four years old. I bought ten or fifteen cents’ worth of eggs. You didn’t get too many eggs for that. But we were down. Margaret said, ‘Why he’ll find those in five minutes.’ I had a couple in the piano and all around. Tommy got his little Easter basket, and as he would find the eggs, I’d steal ’em out of the basket and re-hide them. The kid had more fun that Easter than he ever had. He hunted Easter eggs for three hours and he never knew the difference. (Laughs.) “My son is now thirty-nine years old. And I bore him to death every Easter with the story. He never even noticed his bag full of Easter eggs never got any fuller. . . .

Here, as elsewhere, the gain of creation consists always in the growth of individual minds, which live and aspire, as flowers bloom and birds sing, in the midst of morasses; and in the continual development of that thought, the thought of human destiny, which is given to eternity adequately to express, and which ages of failure only seemingly impede.

Margaret Fuller Slack I WOULD have been as great as George Eliot But for an untoward fate. For look at the photograph of me made by Penniwit, Chin resting on hand, and deep—set eyes— Gray, too, and far-searching. But there was the old, old problem: Should it be celibacy, matrimony or unchastity? Then John Slack, the rich druggist, wooed me, Luring me with the promise of leisure for my novel, And I married him, giving birth to eight children, And had no time to write. It was all over with me, anyway, When I ran the needle in my hand While washing the baby’s things, And died from lock—jaw, an ironical death. Hear me, ambitious souls, Sex is the curse of life.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader اليوم قارئ وغدًا قائد

 ‘Therefore am I still / A lover of the meadows and the woods / And mountains; and of all that we behold / From this green earth; of all the mighty world.’ 

If a thinking woman is offensive, then yes, I might offend a number of people. And I’ll be happy to do so.

As I cry out, Giovanni does the same, and I know that from this moment on I will forever be a fallen woman. Why, then, do I feel as though I’m soaring?

I have neither a dead wife’s fortune, like Waldo, nor Bronson’s utter disregard for the practicalities of life.

Why do women love bad men? Margaret had asked the question herself, and answered it, in Woman in the Nineteenth Century. The belief that men have “stronger passions,” Margaret theorized, has been “inculcated” in women for centuries, and “the preference often shown by women for bad men arises . . . from a confused idea that they are bold and adventurous, acquainted with regions which women are forbidden to explore.

Margaret Fuller, the leading antebellum female intellectual, even went so far as to suggest that the anti-slavery party ought to plead for women’s rights, too—because, like slaves, women were kept in bondage by civil law, custom, and patriarchal abuse.68 It was an emboldening insight. Elizabeth Cady, daughter of a prominent New York lawyer, had had fantasies when she was eleven years old of leading a life of scholarship and self-reliance.

and fueled their mutual passion for the great Romantic texts—Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther and Novalis’s Hymns to the Night—which featured protagonists suffering in equal measure from lost loves and undirected ambition.

This book began with the assertion that Margaret Fuller's life was her most remarkable creation. It is just possible, however, that her most wonderful creations may still lie in the future. Fuller's most precious gift to us may reside in the ideas and the works, still yet to be imagined, of women and men who follow her example. We may decide that, despite all that Margaret Fuller endured and suffered in order to become exceptional, her life, or rather her lives, well deserve imitating.

Margaret described an oppressive awareness that “I have no real hold on life,—no real, permanent connection with any soul.” She felt disembodied, like “a wandering Intelligence, driven from spot to spot.” Perhaps her fate was this: to live alone, to “learn all secrets, and fulfil a circle of knowledge,” but never to experience full communion with another being. The prospect “envelopes me as a cold atmosphere. I do not see how I shall go through this destiny. I can, if it is mine; but I do not feel that I can.

As women, we should feel comfortable expressing ourselves, even disagreeing with others. We are entitled, each one of us, to our own thoughts and opinions. We need not fear that it is unseemly to disagree or hold to a conviction of our own. We must learn to be comfortable in debate and discourse. We must shake off these shackles that are placed upon us by those who say a woman’s only job is to make a man feel respected and affirmed. What of our own self-respect? What of the affirmation of our own thoughts and characters?

Here in Rome, “men live for something else beside money and systems, the voice of noble sentiment is understood.” She had found in Italy “a sphere much more natural to me than what the old puritans or the modern bankers have made” in America, the now stagnant and degraded “new” world.

At Chicago I read again 'Philip Van Artevelde,' and certain passages in it will always be in my mind associated with the deep sound of the lake, as heard in the night. I used to read a short time at night, and then open the blind to look out. The moon would be full upon the lake, and the calm breath, pure light, and the deep voice, harmonized well with the thought of the Flemish hero. When will this country have such a man ? It is what she needs — no thin Idealist, no coarse Realist, but a man whose eye reads the heavens while his feet step firmly on the ground and his hands are strong and dextrous in the use of human instruments. A man, religious, virtuous and — sagacious; a man of universal sympathies, but self-possessed; a man who knows the region of emotion, though he is not its slave; a man to whom this world is no mere spectacle or fleeting shadow, but a great, solemn game, to be played with good heed, for its stakes are of eternal value, yet who, if his own play be true, heeds not what he loses by the falsehood of others. A man who lives from the past, yet knows that its honey can but moderately avail him; whose comprehensive eye scans the present, neither infatuated by its golden lures nor chilled by its many ventures; who possesses prescience, as the wise man must, but not so far as to be driven mad to-day by the gift which discerns to-morrow. When there is such a man for America, the thought which urges her on will be expressed.

At thirty-six, Margaret believed her “mind and character” were already “too much formed” through “a liberal communion with the woful struggling crowd of fellow men.” She had instead worked for a living and reaped the “fruits of spiritual knowledge” these past ten years, seeking common cause with the laborer, the immigrant, the prostitute.

I would like to meet the man who is meant to be my husband. I would like to find the man who sees and knows my soul. It’s not that I wish to marry simply to be married; it’s that I wish to find a love so overpowering that there’s no choice but to join myself with this other person. Until that happens, I can’t see any reason to become a wife.

He became so gloomy that she asked him, at last, if he was worried about anything. He assured her, instantly, that he was the happiest man in the world. And he was. At times he was almost bewildered by his own bliss in being there, with Tony, so terribly dear, beside him; really his own for the rest of his life. It was not her fault if the insatiable sorrows of an unequal love tormented him, the hungry demand for more, for a fuller return, for a feeling which it was not in her nature to give. As she leaned forward, absorbed in the passions staged beneath her, he felt suddenly that their box contained just himself and a wraith, a ghost; as if the real Antonia, whom he loved, was an imagined woman living only in his sad fancy.

She had made the observation several years before to a startled Waldo Emerson that “women are Slaves.” Married women in particular—and that meant most American women—were, in countless legal and emotional respects, the property of their husbands. Their liberation, however, was not to be found in a political movement, Margaret believed, but in reform of themselves as individuals,

Nathaniel Hawthorne, a friend of Margaret Fuller’s in Concord who followed her path to the Continent several years after her death, undertook an experiment in fictional form when he put aside writing stories in favor of longer narratives. He preferred to call his books “Romances,” not novels. “When a writer calls his work a Romance,” Hawthorne explained in his preface to The House of the Seven Gables, “he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume had he professed to be writing a Novel.” The novelist, in Hawthorne’s terms, aims to achieve “a very minute fidelity” to experience, whereas the author of a romance may “bring out or mellow the lights and deepen and enrich the shadows of the picture” while still maintaining strict allegiance to “the truth of the human heart.

Margaret Fuller wondered whether she was "fitted to be loved" -- a word choice both curious and tragic: not "worthy," bespeaking an inherent endowment, but "fitted," as if she could fit herself for love by strain and discipline. With Caroline, with Sam, and now with Waldo, she had pushed and pushed to earn the affection she longed for -- a push that eventually repelled each of its objects. But she could hardly have compartmentalized her nature -- the very nature by which she had reached the stratospheric heights of her achievement. Those accustomed to hard work and self-propulsion, who have risen to the zenith of accomplishment by force of will and magnitude of effort, are most susceptible to the supreme self-damnation of human life -- the belief that love is something to be earned by striving rather than something that comes unbidden like a shepherd's song on a summer evening in the mountains of Bulgaria.

Yet “Platonic affection” can only seem “sublimated and idealized to the more experienced.” It was a painful message for Margaret, an unmarried woman with no romantic prospects but with a deep need for connection with men. Yet there it was: there could be no turning back to the Platonic after a “thorough” experience of passion. Worse, her quest for Platonic affection, for connections or covenants that dwelled only in “the higher emotions,” marked her as “undeveloped”—a notion that Margaret, with her credo of self-expansion, could scarcely tolerate.

And there was a fourth, “highest grade” of marriage, which included the best features of the others, “home sympathies” and “intellectual communion,” but added to these a “religious” dimension, “expressed as a pilgrimage towards a common shrine.” Margaret was careful to specify that by “religion” she meant “the thirst for truth and good, not the love of sect and dogma.” She also had in mind a particular style of devotion: a “reverent love,” a sense that one’s partner is the “only true” companion, the only other one “of all human beings” who can “understand and interpret . . . my inner and outer being.

Margaret’s unfocused striving and rankling frustration over family obligations found answering chords in Goethe’s Romanticism. She began, and hoped to publish, a translation of his play Torquato Tasso, based on the life of an Italian Renaissance poet whose close confidante, an unmarried, intellectually gifted princess, complains of feeling stifled in her gilded cage. Margaret was captivated as well by his novel Elective Affinities, which put into fictional play Goethe’s view, borrowed from new science, that romantic attractions resulted from unalterable chemical “affinities” and should be obeyed regardless of marital ties.

It was not just her unusual intellect and outsized personality that made Margaret seem to Waldo more manly than feminine, but also her anomalous position as a woman “of the bread-winning tribe” who earned her keep as a writer and public speaker, her rate of pay approaching his own. Margaret was Waldo’s female double, not his feminine muse, as Cary was now. Margaret felt this too; it was why she thought she would make a better man than he. And why she rarely looked at men “with common womanly eyes,” as she once wrote to George Davis, but rather with an eye to friendship—yet on her own more womanly terms. If Waldo wished she would befriend him as a brother, she willed him to befriend her as a sister. The disjunction perplexed and saddened them both.

Even more distasteful to him was the way he saw Margaret and other women conversing with each other as they gathered in his parlor: no sooner had the “stricken soul” confessed her woes than her companion “in return . . . disburdens into her ear the story of her misery, as deep & hopeless as her own.” Such an exchange was about as far from the ideal of friendship Waldo espoused as could be imagined, yet it was what Margaret sought from him—a connection through mutual understanding and sympathy—and that, at times, unwilling as he was to admit it, Waldo coveted for himself. For Margaret knew Waldo suffered too, though he presented a “cold pedantic self” to his parlor guests or argued for a Dial “measuring no hours but those of sunshine.” After age thirty, “a man wakes up sad every morning,” he had written in his journal, for no one else to read; but Margaret sensed his melancholy.

IF W.I.T.C.H. IS an example of feminist politics borrowing from the realm of mythos, then it should come as no surprise that feminist spirituality began to get more civic-minded in turn. Though there is evidence that some American Pagan covens existed as early as the 1930s, and Gardnerian Wicca had reached the States by the 1960s, the 1970s brought about a new style of witchcraft that was intent on “combining political and spiritual concerns as if they were two streams of a single river,” as Margot Adler put it. It took the framework of Wicca but gave it a much fuller emphasis on worshipping goddesses and honoring the female body. It also more blatantly reclaimed the witch as an icon of resistance against the patriarchy, following the sentiments of earlier pro-witch thinkers like Matilda Joslyn Gage and Margaret Murray, and the writings of radical feminists like Mary Daly and Andrea Dworkin.

CAST: Barry Fitzgerald as Judge Bernard Fitz of the Vincent County District Court. Bill Green as Sheriff McGrath, “Vincent County’s own little Hitler,” a frequent antagonist of the kind-hearted judge. Barbara Fuller as Susan, the judge’s lovely young niece. Leo Cleary as the bailiff. Dawn Bender as little Mary Margaret McAllister. WRITER-PRODUCER-DIRECTOR: Carlton E. Morse. ANNOUNCER: Frank Martin. ORCHESTRA: Opie Cates. This show bore many of the trademarks that writer Carlton E. Morse had established on One Man’s Family: stories containing-the breath of life, realistic conflicts, and a character who, as Time put it, was “surefire for cornfed philosophizing.” Before his election to the bench, Judge Fitz had been the barber of a small (pop. 3,543) community in the county. At times, when his legal career tried his patience, he longed again for that simpler life. He was staunchly Irish (what else, with Barry Fitzgerald in the lead?) and could be painfully sentimental. One reviewer noted that “he criticizes the law as much as he enforces it, and slyly finds a loophole when he thinks a culprit needs a helping of simple kindness.” The sheriff, on the other hand, had a “lock ’em up and throw away the key” mentality.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader

A house is no home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as for the body. MARGARET FULLER

love is a bonding of the souls,” I muse aloud. “But marriage as a legal institution is a bonding of the physical bodies. Once one’s soul no longer feels itself bound to the other, why, then, doesn’t marriage become a sort of entrapment of the body and the being? For that reason I chose the word unnatural.

Margaret was fortunate that the impulses of Romanticism had brought her together with James Clarke; the literature they explored was suffused with emotionality, suffering, and struggle. By their own example, Goethe, Schiller, and the others gave their male readers permission to be more expressive of their feelings and so to understand and accept a woman’s emotions more readily. Although they were not lovers, Margaret and James could still offer each other small gestures of physical comfort. On one occasion, “her kind pressure of my hand when I was in as miserable a mood” had “rejoiced” James, and he offered her the same one day when she had come to him “with tears glistening in her eyes

on April 28: “Rome is barricaded, the foe daily hourly expected.” These vivid entries, brief as they were, would anchor my narrative of Margaret’s Roman years.

fore-sayer.

By the late 1830s and ’40s, when Margaret was a young single woman living in Providence, Boston, and Cambridge, New England had become the first region in the country with a shortage of men. The overcrowded job market and economic volatility that drove her lawyer father back to farming and her younger brothers to seek employment in the South and West created this imbalance, leaving one third of Boston’s female population unmarried. Little wonder that Margaret toyed for a while with the notion that only an unmarried woman could “represent the female world.” Her argument was theoretical: American wives belonged by law to their husbands and could not act independently. Yet she also spoke for a surging population of women, many of them single, who sought usefulness outside the home and who readily joined the political life of the nation by advocating causes from temperance to abolition long before they gained the right to vote.

took to heart the example of the French novelist George Sand, whom she met in Paris, a woman who effectively articulated her ideas through both conversation and published writing and who chose an independent path in life. She was impressed by the way Sand “takes rank in society like a man, for the weight of her thoughts.” In a time when “self-reliance” was the watchword

Margaret Fuller maintained that all human beings are capable of great accomplishment, that “genius” would be “common as light, if men trusted their higher selves.

Margaret Fuller, and Henry Longfellow all were impelled by the book to the study of German language and literature. The book is attractive, lucid, and accessible. Its four parts cover Germany and the Germans, literature and the arts, philosophy, and religion. There is practically nothing in the book about biblical criticism aside from a paragraph that mentions Michaelis. But there is an excellent and still valuable introduction to Kant and his followers, and there is a great deal about the religious spirit as it flourished in Germany.

Margaret feeling empty. Both lonely and overmanaged, Margaret understood that her father’s plurality of loves in fact was focused on just two females: “In the more delicate and individual relations, he never approached but two mortals, my mother and myself.” She was one of “my pair of Ms,” along with her mother, her father’s possession, his prize. In Timothy’s letters home, read by both wife and daughter,

Although he’d taken a stand in Congress against the Missouri Compromise, an early fugitive slave law, and the Seminole War, he was not making a mark in Washington, and the fault was his own. He confided to his wife, “I am rather too indolent or unenterprising for the slight skirmishes . . . & the great questions require too much trouble and thought.” At night, instead of troubling himself over the “great questions,” he dreamed of Margaret practicing the piano—that lesson “she could never play in true time.” Timothy’s attention to his star pupil was intense, even disturbing, in a man who had once so blithely ignored the boundary between romance and pedagogy.

Inevitably they favored the “brilliant” de Staël, who in Margaret’s words operated “on the grand scale, on liberalizing, regenerating principles.” They were captivated as much by the author’s role as intellectual diva in Revolutionary France as they were by her writing. De Staël—whose De l’Allemagne brought the fervid idealism of German Romantic philosophy to the rest of Europe, and whose Paris salon attracted political refugees and international luminaries alike—was the model both young women needed, even as her example must have seemed impossible to match in parochial New England of the 1820s.

inspiration, free self-expression, and freely expressed emotion—impulses that had already begun to stir a new century of democratic revolution in Europe.

No longer Byronized, Margaret read Schiller, Novalis, Jean Paul Richter, and above all Goethe. “It seems to me as if the mind of Goethe had embraced the universe,” she wrote to James. “He

But Margaret shared Bronson Alcott’s inclination to form collegial relations with his students and had instinctively developed a teaching style that featured the give-and-take of conversation rather than the conventional memorize-and-recite method. Even if she didn’t fully agree with Alcott that her students already possessed profound knowledge, she preferred to cultivate in them—particularly the girls—the ability to express what they learned from her, to ask questions and find the answers.

young nation, not to be matched for another forty years, was under way.

They must “teach self-trust,” allow the student to explore “the resources of his mind” and there discover “all his strength.” “Amid

Waldo does surprise me by offering a piece of feedback. I’m reading him a passage on Goethe’s thoughts on marriage. “ ‘Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished.’ 

The union of two natures for a time is so great

he also recruited another of Emerson’s intimates, Margaret Fuller (no relation to the headmaster), to the teaching staff. It

killed,” Margaret wrote in the Tribune; no one paid the council any attention. The way was clear for the meeting of the Constitutional Assembly, and in early February representatives from all over Italy began to fill the hotels in Rome, so recently abandoned by “the Murray guide book mob.

decades before. Garibaldi had spent his own twenty-year exile in South America, first joining gaucho rebels in Brazil and then raising an “Italian legion” to fight in the Uruguayan civil war; he’d brought sixty of his most loyal soldiers, the core of his highly skilled regiment, back with him to Europe.

Reflecting on the rapid series of events, Margaret wrote to her American readers, “The revolution, like all genuine ones, has been instinctive, its results unexpected and surprising to the greater part of those who achieved them.” In a subsequent session, the assembly voted to call Mazzini to Rome, where he would soon become the most powerful of three triumvirs selected to lead the young republic through its infancy, as the new government prepared to implement a program of drastic reform. A punitive tax on flour would be repealed, a national railway system constructed, church properties claimed for inexpensive housing, and papal lands outside Rome divided among the contadini (Italy’s peasant class).

Margaret had begun to worry that “people in U.S. are fast forgetting me,” but her interest in the New Englanders who had once made up her “large and brilliant circle” was waning too. “O Jamie,” she responded. “What come back for?” Certainly not for “Brownson [and] Alcott and other rusty fusty intel. and spiritual-ities.” Here in Rome, “men live for something else beside money and systems, the voice of noble sentiment is understood.” She had found in Italy “a sphere much more natural to me than what the old puritans or the modern bankers have made” in America, the now stagnant and degraded “new” world.

broke down. Mazzini stayed with Margaret for two hours that night, and “we talked, though rapidly, of everything.” Margaret confided her own “new, strange sufferings,” as she had to Mickiewicz. Mazzini promised to return as often as possible,

but the “crisis is tremendous.

thousand men to regain the city for the pope. The French battalion took up a position thirty-five miles from Rome on the coast at Civitavecchia, flying the tricolor flags of both France and Italy, a deliberate ruse.

Spending the last night of the Roman Republic with Giovanni, making no secret of their connection among his comrades, may have helped Margaret begin to frame the revelations she would soon make to friends and family—“I have united my destiny with that of an obscure young man,” she began one of them. The morning after that surprisingly peaceful night on the Pincian Hill came the assembly vote to surrender, and with it the imperative for republican soldiers to evacuate the city. Giovanni could no longer safely lead a separate life in Rome.

material for her book. Despite the restrictive laws on women and children in the Papal States, Margaret had experienced more freedom of opportunity, both professionally and personally, in Rome than in New England or New York. And now she had a family, a child whose “little heart clings to mine” and a husband whose companionship, Margaret wrote to her sister, Ellen, is “an inestimable blessing.” Giovanni had remained loyal when she was “more sick, desponding and unreasonable in many ways than I ever was before,” and he had cheered and sustained her with “the sacred love, the love passing that of women.” “In him,” Margaret wrote to her mother, “I have found a home.

with the lust of gain, soiled by crime in its willing perpetuation of slavery, shamed by an unjust war,” the imperialist conflict with Mexico over the annexation of Texas.

She had read accounts of the hero’s welcome Mickiewicz received in Florence when he arrived with his regiment—“O, Dante of Poland!”—and she had given her Tribune readers his full address to the cheering crowds. She learned of Mazzini’s triumphal return to Milan in April; until this month the target of a death warrant, this “most beauteous man,” in Margaret’s estimation, was now greeted as his country’s true leader.

from the war against Austrian rule, taking the course opposite to the one Mazzini had urged in his open letter of six months before. Pressured by Catholic monarchies on the run in France, Austria, and Spain to retreat from civil leadership, Pio Nono now instructed the people of Italy to “abide in close attachment to their respective sovereigns.

convey to her family in America if she did not survive the summer. Margaret asked that he “say to those I leave behind that I was willing to die” and that “I have wished to be natural and true.” But “the world was not in harmony with me—nothing came right for me.” She was not without hope for a better life, but Margaret placed her faith in “the spirit that governs the Universe” to “reserve for me a sphere” in that supersensuous ether of the afterworld “where I can develope more freely, and be happier.” She had little expectation that her “forces” would sustain her long enough to find that “better path” on earth.

and teeth ached, but could she trust a midwife’s assurance that this too was natural, common? “According to these women, one must think that this condition is really a martyrdom,” Margaret wrote to her young lover, a boy almost, who had never tended a baby, whose mother had died when he was six, leaving him, her youngest child, unfamiliar with the “ailment” of a woman’s pregnancy. Margaret cried after receiving letters from her family begging her to come home, knowing that she could provide only vague descriptions of her whereabouts, pretend to enjoy “hid[ing] thus in Italy,” like the “great Goethe.” She experienced “fits of deep longing to see persons and objects in America” and once again felt “I have no ‘home,’ no peaceful room to which I can return and repose in the love of my kindred from the friction of care and the world.

gone by” that women begin to ask these questions—too late to profit from the answers.

Talking,” as he called it, leading conversations for adults on the spiritual topics that had gotten him into trouble in the classroom—and getting paid for it. Margaret determined to try the same with a class of adult women in Boston. Her aim was more practical than spiritual, however: to “ascertain what pursuits are best suited to us in our time and state of society, and how we may make best use of our means for building up the life of thought upon the life of action,” as she wrote in a letter to Sophia Ripley, proposing a series of weekly “Conversations” to begin in the fall of 1839 and continue through the spring, if interest remained strong. She asked both Sophia Ripley and Elizabeth Peabody to help her gather a “circle” of women “desirous to answer the great questions. What were we born to do? How shall we do it?” Too often, Margaret observed, thinking perhaps of her mother or the aged women in the Groton cabin, it is only when “their best years are

Her passion for Greco-Roman myth had only been heightened through her German studies when she discovered that Goethe and Schiller, whose adulatory poem “The Gods of Greece” she knew well, also viewed Apollo, Jupiter, Venus, and Minerva as exemplars of human virtues, or, as Margaret herself phrased it, “great instincts—or ideas—or facts of the internal constitution separated & personified.

If she’d been a man, Margaret might have become a popular lecturer, perhaps even more successful than Waldo, who persisted in reading his essays from manuscript pages, using the lecture hall as a workroom for his books rather than a performance space. But, bold as she was as a thinker and writer, Margaret never considered mounting the podium, despite her extraordinary capacity for extemporaneous speech.

For Margaret did not want to be listened to; she “dreaded” the feeling of being on “display,” like “a paid Corinne,” the heroine of a novel by de Staël who entertained parlor audiences as an improvisatrice, holding forth on the splendors of Italian art. She wanted to serve as the “nucleus of conversation,” only “one to give her own best thoughts on any subject that was named, as a means of calling out the thoughts of others.” If the group was a circle, she would be “its moving spring.

over “second hand” representations of God by worn-out churchmen, and argued that religion should become “one thing with Science, with Beauty, and with Joy,” the Universalist preacher Abner Kneeland had spent sixty days in a Boston jail for the crime of publishing a letter in his own newspaper, the Boston Investigator, declaring God to be “nature itself,” and any other deity to be “nothing more than a chimera.” Kneeland’s paper had frightened Boston with its promiscuous advocacy of controversial causes, from a woman’s right to keep her own bank account to interracial marriage, divorce, and birth control: he had been locked up for his politics as much as his pantheism. This was to be the last such incarceration in the state’s history, but no one knew that at the time. In scarcely over a decade there would be arrests of prominent Bostonians for their active opposition to the fugitive slave law;