The Letters of Margaret Fuller: 1839-41Cornell University Press, 1983 - 278 pages This second volume publishes all of Margaret Fuller's letters written from 1839 to 1841--the years in which she first began to achieve fame as a writer and an editor. Addressed to such eminent figures as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, William H. Channing, Elizabeth Peabody, and Frederic H. hedge as well as to Fuller's family and intimate friends, these letters record the years of her involvement in the Transcendentalist Club--a group of liberal clergymen and writers who gathered to discuss theology, literature, and philosophy. In 1839 the Club decided to found a magazine, The Dial; Fuller became the editor, and at last she had a forum for her innovative views of literature and of literary criticism. These are also the years of her famous "conversations" for women--weekly discussions of mythology which were attended by twenty-five of the most prominent women in the area. The letters chronicle the most emotionally turbulent period in her life. In the course of little more than a year she was rejected by the man she loved, Samuel G. Ward, who then married her close friend Anna Barker; she was rebuffed by Emerson as well; and she underwent a profound religious experience that she felt changed her life. |
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... soul loathes the honey- comb , so is it with me as to popular excitements , even on great and vital subjects , when ... soul loatheth an honeycomb ; but to the hungry soul every bitter thing is sweet . " 197. To Ralph Waldo Emerson ...
... soul , and not as a mere comfort - loving inhabitant of earth , or as a subscriber to the social contract . It was not meant that the soul should cultivate the earth , but that the earth should educate and maintain the soul . Man is not ...
... soul cannot be alike satisfied . We love and ought to love one another not merely for the absolute worth of each but on account of a mutual fitness of temporary character . We are not merely one an- other's priests or gods , but ...