Allison Pataki (Beauty in the Broken Places) imagines the brilliant, bittersweet, and mostly forgotten life at the center of the American Transcendentalist movement in Finding Margaret Fuller. Fuller was, as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, the "radiant genius and fiery heart" of an eclectic circle of mid-19th-century American thinkers that included Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Emerson himself. Pataki blows the dust from Fuller's legacy as she inhabits her protagonist's persona, beginning with her first life-changing meeting with Emerson in Concord, Mass., in 1836. Fuller recognizes in the eminent man an intellectual soulmate--"ours is a kinship of the mind"--and the friendship guides her as she continues her quest for self-realization that leads to increasing renown in America and Europe.
Fuller, described by her father as "the Much that always wants More," possesses an insatiable desire for life and meaning, which Pataki captures with exuberant prose. Fuller publishes bestselling book after book and makes history by becoming the first female editor of a major journal, the Dial, and, later, the first American female foreign news correspondent for Horace Greeley's New-York Tribune. But there is pathos aplenty for "this butterfly who never had a place to land," and Pataki's indelible exploration of Fuller's vibrant interiority as both a writer and a woman simply mesmerizes. Chronicling an epochal time of progressive thought, Finding Margaret Fuller reintroduces to a new generation a courageous woman and peerless thinker, "whose words will never die." --Peggy Kurkowski, book reviewer and copywriter in Denver