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Margaret Fuller: A New American Lifeby Megan Marshall
Synopses & ReviewsPublisher Comments: Elizabeth, Mary, and Sophia Peabody were in many ways our American Brontes. The story of these remarkable sisters — and their central role in shaping the thinking of their day — has never before been fully told. Twenty years in the making, Megan Marshall's monumental biograpy brings the era of creative ferment known as American Romanticism to new life. Elizabeth, the oldest sister, was a mind-on-fire thinker. A powerful influence on the great writers of the era — Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau among them — she also published some of their earliest works. It was Elizabeth who prodded these newly minted Transcendentalists away from Emerson's individualism and toward a greater connection to others. Mary was a determined and passionate reformer who finally found her soul mate in the great educator Horace Mann. The frail Sophia was a painter who won the admiration of the preeminent society artists of the day. She married Nathaniel Hawthorne — but not before Hawthorne threw the delicate dynamics among the sisters into disarray. Marshall focuses on the moment when the Peabody sisters made their indelible mark on history. Her unprecedented research into these lives uncovered thousands of letters never read before as well as other previously unmined original sources. The Peabody Sisters casts new light on a legendary American era. Its publication is destined to become an event in American biography. This book is highly recommended for students and reading groups interested in American history, American literature, and women's studies. It is a wonderful look into 19th-century life. Synopsis:The award-winning author of The Peabody Sisters takes a fresh look at the trailblazing life of a great American heroine—Thoreaus first editor, Emersons close friend, first female war correspondent, passionate advocate of personal and political freedom. Synopsis: From an early age, Margaret Fuller provoked and dazzled New Englands intellectual elite. Her famous Conversations changed womens sense of how they could think and live; her editorship of the Transcendentalist literary journal the Dial shaped American Romanticism. Now, Megan Marshall, whose acclaimed The Peabody Sisters “discovered” three fascinating women, has done it again: no biography of Fuller has made her ideas so alive or her life so moving.
Marshall tells the story of how Fuller, tired of Boston, accepted Horace Greeleys offer to be the New-York Tribunes front-page columnist. The move unleashed a crusading concern for the urban poor and the plight of prostitutes, and a late-in-life hunger for passionate experience. In Italy as a foreign correspondent, Fuller took a secret lover, a young officer in the Roman Guard; she wrote dispatches on the brutal 1849 Siege of Rome; and she gave birth to a son.
Yet, when all three died in a shipwreck off Fire Island shortly after Fullers fortieth birthday, the sense and passion of her lifes work were eclipsed by tragedy and scandal. Marshalls inspired account brings an American heroine back to indelible life.
About the AuthorMegan Marshall is the author of The Peabody Sisters, which won the Francis Parkman Prize, the Mark Lynton History Prize, the Massachusetts Book Award in Nonfiction, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in biography and memoir. Her essays and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The Atlantic, and Slate. A recipient of Guggenheim and NEH fellowships, Marshall teaches narrative nonfiction and the art of archival research in the MFA program at Emerson College. Table of ContentsList of Illustrations xiii Prologue xv Part I: Youth 1. Three Letters 5 2. Ellen Kilshaw 10 3. Theme: “Possunt quia posse videntur” 20 4. Mariana 28 Part II: Cambridge 5. The Young Ladys Friends 39 6. Elective Affinities 51 Part III: Groton and Providence 7. “My heart has no proper home” 71 8. “Returned into life” 89 9. “Bringing my opinions to the test” 105 Part IV: concord, boston, jamaica plain 10. “What were we born to do?” 127 11. “The gospel of Transcendentalism” 142 12. Communities and Covenants 163 13. “The newest new world” 202 Part V: New York 14. “I stand in the sunny noon of life” 223 15. “Flying on the paper wings of every day” 235 16. “A human secret, like my own” 244 Part VI: Europe 17. Lost on Ben Lomond 269 18. “Rome has grown up in my soul” 282 19. “A being born wholly of my being” 315 Part VII: homeward 20. “I have lived in a much more full and true way” 353 21. “No favorable wind” 369 Epilogue: “After so dear a storm” 379 Acknowledgments 393 Notes 397 Index 451 What Our Readers Are SayingBe the first to add a comment for a chance to win!Product Details
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