Margaret Fuller ~ A New American Life: Review and Giveaway

Was Margaret Fuller America's first true feminist? 

Margaret Fuller (1810 - 1850) was a writer and an advocate for women's rights, including women's education and the right to employment; she also encouraged prison reform and the emancipation of slaves in the United States. Susan B. Anthony, and other advocates for women's rights, including Virginia Woolf, were inspired and influenced by the work of Margaret Fuller.  Megan Marshall, the award-winning author of The Peabody Sisters, presents a powerful portrait of a true pioneer in the biography, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life, published in 2013.

"She insisted too that her ideas be valued as high as those of the brilliant men who were her comrades."
~ Margaret Fuller: A New American Life, Megan Marshall

Born in Cambridge, MA, Sarah Margaret Fuller Ossoli, usually known as Margaret Fuller, was the first full-time American female book reviewer in journalism, and a transcendentalist.  Home-schooled in a rigorous fashion as a child by her father, Timothy Fuller, she later attended school outside of her home, and eventually became a teacher.

"Today a reader, tomorrow a leader."
~Margaret Fuller

Highly intelligent, she was a precocious and voracious reader, and by the time she was in her 30s, she was known as the best-read person in New England.  She was confident and competent, and she didn't allow others to 'erode her enthusiastic confidence of the future'.

Starting in 1839, she began hosting "Conversations", discussions among women on various topics (the first one focused on Greek and Roman mythology), which encouraged women to communicate with each other in a candid way, and were early consciousness-raising groups for women.  She became the first editor of  Henry David Thoreau's transcendentalist journal, The Dial, in 1840, and a few years later, in 1844, she joined the staff of the New York Tribune under Horace Greeley.  Her influential work, available as a free ebook on Project Gutenberg, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, was published in 1845 (other books by Margaret Fuller are also available online).  This book is considered to be the first major feminist work in the United States.

Margaret Fuller became the first female correspondent in Europe for the Tribune, and she became involved with the Revolutions of 1848 in the Italian states.  She had a romantic relationship with a younger man, Giovanni Ossoli, and they had a child together.  Sadly, the family of three died in a shipwreck off Fire Island, New York, in 1850, when Margaret Fuller was 40 years old.

Through extensive research which included the reading of her letters, journals, and published work, Megan Marshall brings Margaret Fuller to life.  Throughout her life, Margaret Fuller was a prolific letter writer who "maintained important correspondences" with transcendental thinkers of her time, including Ralph Waldo Emerson (who I've envisioned like Thoreau, walking alone in the woods, contemplating human nature in nature).  She was friends with many intellectuals, including Emerson, Thoreau, the Peabody sisters, the Alcotts, Carlyle, and Mazzini.

If you've ever entertained the idea that people who lived in the 1800s were perhaps deeper thinkers than people today, this book will reaffirm that belief.  This biography gives Margaret Fuller an eloquent voice and presence, by using many of her written words, in quotes. The use of Margaret Fuller's own words, extracted from her letters, journals and work, allows her to tell her own story--this book is almost like an autobiography. (I believe it may be more truthful because it was largely created by the subject's exact words.)  I experienced her profound, astonishing intelligence, and vivacious, sociable personality, in an intimate fashion.  In addition to the quotes throughout the text, many of the chapter titles are quotes from Margaret Fuller's writing.

As I read this biography, I became familiar with Margaret Fuller's manner of speaking and expression of ideas, and I felt as if I were getting to know her beyond a superficial level, as is often the case when we read the personal letters of others, which are filled with thought and feeling.  I also discovered her innate, articulated need to express herself--'a mind that insisted on utterance'--and to go beyond self to help others, especially women.

"If you have knowledge, let others light their candles in it."
~Margaret Fuller

Margaret Fuller was truly a woman ahead of her time, who believed that women deserved to be seen as the equals of men, and that marriage should be egalitarian (or at least more egalitarian).  Margaret Fuller: A New American Life is an impressive, well-crafted biography, which features some finely-detailed pictures.  It's a brilliant choice for anyone interested in learning about the life of this remarkable writer and pioneer.

Exciting news for my readers!  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is generously offering a copy of Margaret Fuller: A New American Life as a giveaway (U.S./Canada only).

• To enter this giveaway, simply leave a comment.
• For another chance at winning, become a follower of this blog, or let me know that you're already a follower.
• For an additional chance, post about this giveaway on your blog, Facebook, Pinterest, or Twitter.

Enter by 5 PM PDT on Monday, June 3.  One winner will be selected randomly and announced on Tuesday, June 4.  Good luck! 


Special thanks to Lisa from TLC for sending me an advance copy of this book.  For additional reviews and other features, please visit the other stops on TLC's book tour of Margaret Fuller: A New American Life.

To the Lighthouse

After reading some lighter fiction, I decided to delve into something deeper, a novel by Virginia Woolf. I located the tattered copy from my school days and took a deep breath. Here is another phenomenal book by Virginia Woolf. Published in 1927, To the Lighthouse broke new ground and Virginia Woolf emerged as the chief figure of modernism--and perhaps feminism--in England.

The book begins as Mrs. Ramsay, mother to eight children, speaks to her youngest child, James, age six, about his wish to go to the Lighthouse on the following day:

"Yes, of course, if it's fine tomorrow," said Mrs. Ramsay. "But you'll have to be up with the lark", she added. To her son these words conveyed an extraordinary joy, as if it were settled, the expedition bound to take place, and the wonder to which he looked forward to, for years and years it seemed, was, after a night's darkness and a day's sail, within touch. ~To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf

However, Mr. Ramsay, as well as Charles Tansley, soon shatter the boy's hopes by saying that it will rain the next day, and that a trip to the Lighthouse is out of the question, which upsets both James and his devoted mother greatly. The setting for the story begins at the summer house at the Isle of the Skye during the summer, where the Ramsays entertain numerous friends in addition to their large family. Mrs. Ramsay tries to soothe the boy by saying that the weather may be fine, because she has a far greater understanding of her sensitive, gifted child than either her husband or his friend. Keenly aware of the beauty and brevity of childhood, she wants her children to be happy and hopeful, to be filled with light, in a world with ample darkness. The novel focuses on the intensity of childhood emotions, and accentuates the impermanence of adult relationships and the transient nature of everything. The issue of the trip to the Lighthouse is brought up time and time again in the first section of To the Lighthouse, The Window, in which through repetition and stream-of-consciousness writing (Virginia Woolf's trademark style), the interior monologues of various characters are presented, seizing fleeting moods, feelings, thoughts, and insecurities, and the transient nature of things and relationships, giving permanence to these moments in the book, making them immortal--which seems to have been the author's goal. Like our own thoughts, which are often repetitious (and dare I say dull at times), the characters seem to tire of their own cyclical thoughts. At other times, their disjointed thoughts are featured. Virginia Woolf captures the dual reality of thought in To The Lighthouse, thought which is alternatively repetitive and disconnected. (Think about your own thinking--isn't it also this way?)

Just as in the story the painter Lily Briscoe tries to capture beautiful Mrs. Ramsay in a painting (although Lily is scoffed at, and the male belief was that women could neither paint nor write) the book attempts to make the impermanent permanent, and portrays these fleeting moments brilliantly, especially those between husband and wife. This is Virginia's Woolf's most autobiographical novel, and her husband, Leonard Woolf, called it a masterpiece. Virginia Woolf broke from tradition in this three part book, a novel in which there's not much action or dialogue, but instead much thought, about the ordinary as well as about time and the fleeting nature of life. One of the book's main themes is the ubiquity of transience. Is there an antidote for this often disturbing transience? Virginia Woolf suggests to women that while family and human relationships are important (although difficult sometimes), creative work may hold the key--meaningful work that will engage and may even outlive us. In this way, transience may be transcended to some degree.

You can read all three sections of To The Lighthouse online, compliments of Project Gutenberg Australia. To the Lighthouse was made into a TV movie released in 1983, which stars Rosemary Harris, Michael Gough, Suzanne Bertish, and Kenneth Branagh.

1/30/10 Update: For another review of To The Lighthouse, please visit Absorbed in Words.

Blue Shoes and Happiness: In the Company of Snakes and Feminists

Imagine a cobra coiled up at your feet--would you panic? I don't know much about surviving an encounter with a venomous snake, other than to limit sudden movements which could provoke a snake to strike. Blue Shoes and Happiness takes place in Africa--as do all the books in the No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency series--where snakes are a real danger. In the second chapter of Blue Shoes and Happiness, a snake is discovered in the detective agency office, and while the chapter is humorous it's no laughing matter to deal with this formidable creature:

"And remember that they are as frightened of us as we are of them--possibly even more so." (Omed Ramotswe, Precious Ramotswe's late father) But no snake could have been as terrified as Mma Matkutsi when she saw the hood of the cobra at her feet sway from side to side. She knew she should avert her eyes, as such snakes can spit their venom into the eyes of their target with uncanny accuracy; she knew that, but still found her gaze fixed to the small black eyes of the snake, so tiny and so filled with menace.
~Blue Shoes and Happiness, Alexander McCall Smith

Needless to say, they survive this frightful snake encounter, and Alexander McCall Smith goes on to write the eighth book in this series. Another "frightening" subject in the book is feminism. What does it mean to women and men in Africa, and elsewhere? Is it something to be feared? When Mma Makutsi tells her fiancé, Phuti Radiphuti, that she's a feminist, after he asks her, she unwittingly scares him off, and soon regrets her "careless words". Phuti, who has not had much experience with women, fears that he'll be "swept aside" by this feminism--he even dreams of a giant broom--and be the target of future criticism and derision. Mma Makutsi's thoughts dwell on this matter and what feminism means to her:

"Of course she believed in those things which feminists stood up for--the right of women to have a good job and be paid the same amount as men doing the same work; the right of women to be free of bullying by their husbands. But that was all just good common sense, fairness really, and the fact that you supported these goals did not make you one of those feminists who said that men were finished. How could they say such a thing? We were all people--men and women--and you could never say that one group of people were less important than another. She would never say that, and yet Phuti Radiphuti now probably imagined that she would."
~Blue Shoes and Happiness, Alexander McCall Smith

A good way to think about feminism and sexism, in my opinion. Will Mma Makutsi and Phuti Radiphuti resolve their misunderstanding and head towards matrimony? My fingers are crossed.