When Margaret Fuller perished in a shipwreck off the coast of Fire Island in 1850 along with her husband and son, the world was quick to forget the Transcendentalist author. Male counterparts in the movement--including Emerson, Thoreau and Hawthorne--dismissed her foundational feminist essay, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, as insignificant, even scandalous. In Miss Fuller, April Bernard takes a speculative scalpel to the life of Margaret Fuller, offering a narrative of her experiences that shines a harsh and unbecoming light on the male Transcendentalists.
Fuller didn't have to die, we learn from Emerson, who was both her guru and taskmaster. Lack of funds, largely due to Emerson's pressure on her editor, caused Fuller to set sail on a merchant vessel. Emerson objected to her working in Europe, and objected to her marriage--only as a virgin, he postulated, could she truly embody the New Woman of the 19th century. When she became a wife, she must inevitably belong to her husband.
It is Anne Thoreau, Henry Thoreau's sister, who bears silent witness to these events and is subtly shaped by them. A woman of her time, she finds Margaret's vehemence irritating, and upon the news of Margaret's death, Anne can't help but feel that it was somehow deserved.
Yet as the years fly by, Anne has time to contemplate Margaret's written exhortations to women to live a "complete" life... and then she reads Margaret's story. Through Margaret's confessions, Anne at last comes to some quiet, uncomfortable realizations about herself and her life. --Ilana Teitelbaum, book reviewer at the Huffington Post