MARGARET FULLER.* Mum has been written of Margaret Fuller, but
biography hitherto has approached her from some special aspect as literary pioneer and feminist in America or as a somewhat serpentine wise-woman. "No one," says Miss Anthony, "has attempted a realistic interpretation of her life and character." Yet the woman who roused the admiration of Emerson, the Carlyles, Mazzini, and the Brownings is an ideal subject, not only because of her strange, distinctive and great personality (a personality so restless and vigorous that when baulked of external activity it turned inwards and devoured its owner), but also because her life, with its alternations of repression and escape and its furs' tragic fulfilment, was strangely fitted to reveal the process of development of that personality. Miss Anthony has treated her heroine with great sympathy and insight, and the result is a truly absorbing book.
We see the girl of fifteen who so acutely estimated her own qualities :-
" I am wanting in that intuitive tact and polish, whit h Nature has bestowed upon some, but which I must acquire. And, on the other hand, my powers of intellect, though sufficient, I suppose, are not well disciplined. Yet all such hindrances may be overcome by an ardent spirit. If I fail, my consolation shall be found in active employment."
Later, we are shown the girl of violent and sentimental friend- ships ; the girl whom suppressed emotions and the lack of a
congenial field of activity drove to dreams, strange fantasies, and later to the mysticism of Novella in which, as Miss Anthony says, "she tried to find consolation for her surcharged longings in a life of visions " ; the young woman of twenty-four who, as a protest against their retirement from Boston to a country farm, engaged in an emotional conflict with her father which ended in a serious illness. A sharp revelation of her mental stress at home is given in her reply to an accusation of arrogance. " Remember," she said, " that only through aspirations, which sometimes make me what is called unreasonable, have I been enabled to vanquish unpropitious circumstances and save my soul alive."
Then comes her appearance in public life as the champion of woman's rights. From 1839 to 1844 she held her famous Conversations for women. She was one of the greatest talkers in an age of great talkers and conversation, not ink and paper, was her true medium of expression. " Conversation," she said, " is my natural element. I need to be called out, and never think alone, without imagining some companion." Her feminism was wide and comprehensive, and in writing of those other great feminists, Mary Wollstonecraft and George Sand, she described herself :-
"Such beings as these, rich in genius, of most tender sympa- thies, capable of high virtue and a chastened harmony, ought not to find themselves, by birth, in a place so narrow, that in breaking bonds, they become outlaws."
Then we find her, with Emerson, among the New England Transcendentalists, and, soon after, she emerges a journalist, as joint editor with Emerson of the Dial, and afterwards as an important member of the staff of the New York Tribune. But all this time one feels that the scope which life offered her was too exclusively intellectual : some more passionate activity
• Margaret Fuller. By Katharine Anthony. London: Jonathan Capes (74.
boas necessary to occupy fully this fiery creature. And the visit to Europe and to Rome, followed by her active concern
with Mazzini in the Revolution and her love affair and eventual marriage to the young Marchese Ossoli, even the tragic death of herself, her husband, and her baby in the shipwreck within sight of New York, come as a fulfilment of our desire that she should receive all that she craved for at the hands of life. So George Eliot felt, and so she wrote in a letter to a friend :-
" It is a help to read such a life as Margaret Fuller's. How inexpressibly touching that passage from her Journal : I shall always reign through the intellect, but the life I the life ! oh, my God, shall that never be sweet ? ' I am thankful, as if for myself, that it was sweet at last."
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