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9780820328942

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This impressive, scholarly biography brings to life the joyless, anxiety-ridden child, the unattractive adolescent, and the verbally brilliant young woman in her twenties, who can support herself, through her twenties and into her thirties, teaching, conversing, and writing. Amazing that this protected prodigy should spend her last few years not only in poverty but in the midst of a raging Italian revolution, with a baby she could not acknowledge or care for, and in service to an emergency hospital for wounded and dying militia. Even when we know the story, this retelling keeps us glued to the book's pages. In these pages, perhaps for the first time from a feminist point of view, we see the intellectual Margaret Fuller, the writer of the United States' first feminist manifesto, warts and all as a passionate, strong woman, fully human. One realizes, as the tragic ending closes in, how great a loss was Fuller's needless death. --Florence Howe, City University of New York Graduate Center

While nearly every biographer has noticed Timothy Fuller's strong impact upon his daughter's personality, no one before Murray has given this father-daughter bond such a central explanatory role. . . . By necessity, this biographical approach is speculative, but--like a psychoanalyst--Murray reconstructs the psychosexual depths of Fuller's personality, building out of its fragments a compelling portrait of a passionate woman's development. At its finest moments, Murray's biography does an excellent job balancing Fuller's life and writing, illustrating that the personal <i>is</i> the political. . . . Providing an engaging map to Fuller's tangled emotional concerns, Murray's biography encourages a strong readerly identification with the suffering female, who, by the end, looks very much like the modern career woman attempting--in her final months in Italy--to juggle the competing demands of raising an infant son and working as a war correspondent and journalist.</p>--Jeffrey Steele <i>Legacy, A Journal of American Women Writers</i>

Murray...deserves praise for her nuanced reading of Fuller's romantic personality. Murray's scholarship is impeccable and generous.... Her probing of Fuller's psychology deepens understanding of Fuller's major works.... [Murray's] biography [is] an astute contribution to the literature on Fuller and on the development of American studies. -- C. Rollyson CHOICE, July 2008

Author Information

Meg McGavran Murray, until her recent retirement, taught English at Mississippi State University and, before that, at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. She is the editor of the essay collection Face to Face.

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