cover image Minerva and the Muse: A Life of Margaret Fuller

Minerva and the Muse: A Life of Margaret Fuller

Joan Von Mehren. University of Massachusetts Press, $45 (398pp) ISBN 978-0-87023-941-0

Fuller (1810-1850), a journalist, critic and author of a pioneering treatise on women's rights (Women in the Nineteenth Century), is accorded a preeminent place in American intellectual history in this carefully researched, important study. Von Mehren, a freelance writer-scholar, details Fuller's evolution from child prodigy to leading New England intellectual. Her friendship with Ralph Waldo Emerson led to a position editing and writing literary criticism for the Dial, a transcendentalist journal. In 1840, she led a series of renowned ``conversations'' between influential Boston women on philosophical topics. In 1844, Fuller moved to New York City and became the first woman to write for Horace Greeley's Tribune. Greeley sent her to Europe, where she reported on the Italian revolution of 1845. Overcoming earlier disappointments in love, Fuller married Giovanni Ossoli, an Italian with whom she had a child. All three died tragically in a shipwreck off Fire Island while returning to the U.S. Photos. (Jan.)