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Margaret Fuller: Collected Writings

Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 | Woman in the Nineteenth Century | Essays, Journalism, Journals, Letters More

Edited by Brigitte Bailey, Noelle A. Baker, and Megan Marshall

“The splendid Library of America edition of Margaret Fuller’s collected writings allows us to rediscover her genius beyond the two books, both published in the mid-1840s, for which she is known. . . . Fuller’s book reviews, also included here, sparkle with sharp insights and stinging verdicts; her letters combine intimacy with firmness of purpose; and her journals display an unflinching self-awareness that prompts her to record even her nightmares. . . . She was, in short, the least dreary of writers.”—Christoph Irmscher, The Wall Street Journal

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Table of Contents

Overview

Interviews The Mind and Heart of Margaret Fuller: Three Editors on Assembling the Definitive Edition of a Singular American Voice
February 27, 2025

Transcendentalist, journalist, pioneering feminist, public intellectual, war correspondent, poet—Margaret Fuller’s diverse and radical achievements in her short life are vividly captured in her brilliant and still surprising writings. This authoritative Library of America volume is the first new edition of her works in more than a generation and the most comprehensive ever published.

An account of Fuller’s travels to the prairies and Great Lakes, Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 (1844) is a sketchbook of poems, meditations, and commentary about emerging national issues, from the status of women on the frontier to the despoliation of the natural environment to the plight of displaced American Indian tribes. Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845)—the most influential work on women’s rights since Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and a foundational document of American feminism—is a groundbreaking multigenre study of gender and gender fluidity so ahead of its time that Edgar Allan Poe was moved to write, “humanity can be divided into three classes: men, women, and Margaret Fuller.”

These major works are supplemented by a generous selection of Fuller’s journalism and other writings. Experimental fiction from The Dial and reviews of such writers as George Sand and Frederick Douglass join columns on contemporary social issues for the New-York Tribune and war reporting from the French siege of Rome in 1849. More than a dozen selections from Fuller’s unpublished writings, many previously known only to scholars, are newly transcribed from her manuscripts and journals. A selection of letters to such correspondents as Emerson, Thoreau, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, among others, includes three newly translated from the Italian.

Rounding out the volume are a chronology by Fuller’s Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer Megan Marshall, a textual essay describing the sources for the works collected, helpful notes identifying Fuller’s many allusions and quotations, a general index, and an index of Fuller’s poetry.

Brigitte Bailey is Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire. She is the author of American Travel Literature, Gendered Aesthetics, and the Italian Tour, 1824–1862 (2018), co-editor of Transatlantic Women: Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Great Britain (2012) and Margaret Fuller and Her Circles (2013), and former president of the Margaret Fuller Society.

Dr. Noelle A. Baker, an independent scholar, is editor of Stanton in Her Own Time (2016) and co-editor of The Almanacks of Mary Moody Emerson: A Scholarly Digital Edition (ongoing). She is editor in chief of the open-access, peer-reviewed journal Scholarly Editing and has served on the advisory board of the Margaret Fuller Transnational Archive and as an officer of the Margaret Fuller Society.

Megan Marshall is the Charles Wesley Emerson Professor at Emerson College. She is the author of Margaret Fuller: A New American Life, winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in Biography; The Peabody Sisters (2005) winner of the Francis Parkman Prize and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and After Lives: On Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart (2025). She is a past president of the Society of American Historians and has served on the board of the Margaret Fuller Society.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

This volume is available for adoption in the Guardian of American Letters Fund.
Table of Contents

SUMMER ON THE LAKES, IN 1843

WOMAN IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

SHORT PUBLISHED WORKS

New England, 1839–1844
Translator’s Preface: Conversations with Goethe in the Last Years of His Life
A Short Essay on Critics
A Record of Impressions: Produced by the Exhibition of Mr. Allston’s Pictures in the Summer of 1839
The Magnolia of Lake Pontchartrain
Leila
Yuca Filamentosa
from Bettine Brentano and Her Friend Günderode

New York, 1844–1846
Emerson’s Essays
French Novelists of the Day: Balzac, George Sand, Eugene Sue
Review of Etherology; or The Philosophy of Mesmerism and Phrenology by J. Stanley Grimes
Our City Charities
Prevalent Idea That Politeness Is Too Great a Luxury to Be Given to the Poor
Review of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave by Frederick Douglass
The Irish Character
Review of Tales by Edgar Allan Poe
The Wrongs of American Women. The Duty of American Women.
Review of Poems by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Review of The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley
1st January, 1846
Review of Mosses from an Old Manse by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Review of Memoirs, Official and Personal by Thomas L. M’Kenney
Review of Ormond; Or, the Secret Witness and Wieland; Or, the Transformation by Charles Brockden Brown
Farewell
American Literature: Its Position in the Present Time, and Prospects for the Future

Europe, 1846–1850
Letters from England
     Liverpool and Manchester
Things and Thoughts in Europe No. V
     Scotland, Mary Queen of Scots, and Ben Lomond
Things and Thoughts in Europe No. X
     London and Paris, French Theater and Literature
Things and Thoughts in Europe No. XIII
     Paris, Lyons, Naples
To a Daughter of Italy
     Poem in The People’s Journal
Things and Thoughts in Europe No. XVIII
     American Tourists and European and American Politics
Things and Thoughts in Europe No. XIX
     Living in “the real Rome”
Things and Thoughts in Europe No. XXV
     The Revolutions of 1848 in Italy
Things and Thoughts in Europe No. XXVI
     Revolutionary Rome
Things and Thoughts in Europe No. XXVIII
     Proclamation of the Roman Republic
Undaunted Rome
      “I write you from barricaded Rome”
Things and Thoughts in Europe No. XXXIII
     The French Army Bombs and Occupies Rome
Italy
     “The next revolution, here and elsewhere, will be radical”

UNPUBLISHED WRITINGS
“Possent quia posse videntur” (c. pre-fall 1819)
Autobiographical Romance (1840)
Fictional Autobiographical Fragment (c. 1841–42)
A Credo (1842)
To Beethoven (1843)
Chamois (c. 1844)

JOURNALS
Poems and Selections from Journal Fragments (1833–1844)
from S. M. Fuller’s bouquet.—Journal (c. 1836–1837)
from Reflections Journal (c. 1839)
from Bound Journal (c. 1839–40)
from 1842 Journal (August 18–September 25, 1842)
from October 1842 Journal
from Journal Fragments (c. 1840, 1844)
from Manuscript Tracing Journal (1844)
from Italy 1849 Journal

LETTERS
Over fifty letters to such correspondents as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Sophia Peabody, William Henry Channing, and Catherine Sturgis Tappan.

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