I don’t think the ideal Margaret Fuller novel will ever be written, but Carol Strickland’s effort certainly goes a long way. Traditionally there has been something of an obsession with Fuller’s effect on men so I was very pleased that Ms. Strickland opens with two women discussing the latest news about Margaret. They are Caroline Sturgis Tappan (Cary) and Sophia Peabody Hawthorne (Sophia). We catch the tension from the outset.
“You’re like Margaret.” Begrudging admiration tinged Sophia’s voice. “What do you hear from our crusading heroine, La Signora Margaret Fuller Ossoli?”
So we begin near the end with Margaret in Italy after a failed revolution as the scene shifts from Stockbridge, MA to Florence. We follow along with Margaret and her husband and child basically on the run. There is a meeting with Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Then we shift back to 1836 when Margaret is teaching at Bronson Alcott’s school where one of her prize pupils is the teenage Cary Sturgis. We move along to one of Margaret’s series of Conversations that includes both Sophia and Cary. I always thought it would be great to be a fly on the wall at the conversations that must have preceded THE Conversations. That’s what we need novelists for and Ms. Strickland carries it off well. In the Conversation conducted by Margaret Lidian Emerson is introduced in a sort of handmaid role.
The scene then shifts to Concord so we can meet Emerson, Thoreau and Hawthorne. I always have a hard time with this part of the story, which comes out of my own introduction to Margaret Fuller in 1972 while taking a course called Hawthorne, Melville and Twain with Margaret being sort of the girl Transcendentalist and the inspiration for Zenobia. As the years went by I had this nagging sense that she was more important but in my sort of random but still deep reading about the era she just didn’t come up much until I stumbled on Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s biography of her and learned the name Ossoli for the first time. Still this portion is important for what is coming.
Nonetheless, it was great to get back on the main track as we move to Fishkill, New York and the Big Apple itself as Woman in the Nineteenth Century is finished and released. I’m particularly partial to the New York Margaret.
“After Boston’s prim Puritanism and Concord’s high-minded moralism, New York City agreed very well with Margaret. She adored her work at the Tribune, no matter how Waldo dismissed it as “running on a treadmill of newspaper foolishness.” Half a hundred thousand readers hung on her every written utterance. Her articles adorned the front page of the Tribune,”
The relationship or whatever it was with James Nathan gets some treatment. I was hoping for more. That thing is probably worth a novel of its own. I’m grateful that at least it wasn’t skipped. The main role the affair plays to move this story forward is the rare instance of brother-in-law Ellery Channing being right about something.
Also moving the story along is a meeting with Walt Whitman which is one of those things that should have happened and maybe even might have happened but left no footprint in the historic record.
We get coverage of Margaret’s meetings with George Sand and Adam Mickiewicz as she embarks on her tour of Europe. My big disappointment was no mention of the night alone on the Scottish moor. There has to be something left for other novelists to tackle. Like the meeting with Whitman a run-in with William Sturgis is probably meant to advance the story. The romance with Ossoli is handled very well. The novel includes another romantic interlude that while fictional is quite exciting. No spoilers on that.
The first half of the book ends with Margaret and Ossoli and their child on their way to America on the ill-fated slow boat.
The second half opens with news of Margaret’s tragic death and how the various characters react. This then leads to the dramatic setup. Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville. Sophia Hawthorne, Caroline Sturgis Tappan (without husband Will), Lidian Emerson, Ellen Fuller Channing (Margaret’s sister) and her husband Ellery Channing, Captain William Sturgis (Cary’s father) and Henry David Thoreau are all gathered together to discuss how Margaret should be remembered. I couldn’t help but think of the Return of the Secaucus Seven as Whitman fills the function of the tag along boyfriend who has to have everything explained to him.
Here is Cary, whom I really like:
“Let me enlighten you about these fair-weather friends,” she offered. “Nat is a prig and detests any woman who dares be true to herself. Sophie is thoroughly indoctrinated. She used to love Margaret; now she fears her ideas. My father lives in the past, Lidian wraps herself in the mantle of saintly martyr, and Waldo is paralyzed by cowardice. Even Henry endures a lonely life.”
I sometimes got a little bogged down. In the film version, there might have to be some character compression. It was definitely worth going through as along with a seminar of first wave feminism, we get Melville gathering material for Moby Dick from Captain Sturgeon and Thoreau deciding that maybe his sojourn on Walden Pond could have a book made out of it. And then there is the mystery of Margaret’s history of the Roman Revolution, which is probably one of the most missed stories in European history. As the author admits much of it didn’t happen, but I really wish it did.
The biggest plus to this book is that it shows us Margaret Fuller seen through the eyes of other capable women playing the cards that they have been dealt by the mid-nineteenth century.
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