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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... sweet South West be ] sweet South West ( , ) be 1. Beginning in September 1839 , Fuller , Alcott , Ripley , and Emerson discussed the possibility of a new literary journal . On 20 October , the day she here proposes , Fuller and Alcott ...
... sweet harmony and last " night in such full strains that it seemed as if that must be the last of " my human life . Yet here I am and willing to stay in a spot from which such infinite loveliness may be descried , such infinite holiness ...
... sweet harmony and last ] sweet harmony and ( through ) last the last of ] the last ( night ) of 1. Sam Ward and Anna Barker had been married on 3 October ; they were now on their honeymoon ( Barker Genealogy , p . 180 ) . 2. As Fuller ...