Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life, Vol. 2: The Public Years [Hardcover]

Charles Capper (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 11, 2007 | ISBN-10: 0195063139 | ISBN-13: 978-0195063134

Filled with dramatic, ironic, and sometimes tragic turns, this superb biography captures the story of one of America's most extraordinary figures, producing at once the best life of Fuller ever written, and one of the great biographies in American history. In Volume II, Charles Capper illuminates Fuller's "public years," focusing on her struggles to establish her identity as an influential intellectual woman in the Romantic Age. He brings to life Fuller's dramatic mixture of inward struggles, intimate social life, and deep engagements with the movements of her time. He describes how Fuller struggled to reconcile high avant-garde cultural ideals and Romantic critical methods with democratic social and political commitments, and how she strove to articulate a cosmopolitan vision for her nation's culture and politics. Capper also offers fresh and often startlingly new treatments of Fuller's friendships with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Carlyle, and Giuseppe Mazzini, in addition to many others.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. This long-awaited second volume of Capper's Bancroft Prize–winning biography of Fuller fulfills all expectations. Capper follows Fuller's increasing literary fame and her travels to the American West and to Europe; he also recovers her thinking on topics ranging from religion to "the woman question." Fuller emerges as a proto-modernist, someone who "managed to slip more completely than any other intellectual of her generation the leash of Victorian repressions and evasions." Fuller articulated a radically Transcendental critique of classical Christianity, arguing that if men and women did not interpret the Bible "by the freedom of their own souls," they would render the Bible untrue. Capper offers a nuanced and sophisticated reading of Fuller's tracts on gender, which he says have important philosophical and literary qualities. He treats Fuller's personal life as well, chronicling her struggles with finances, her relationship with Emerson and her affair with an Italian partisan 10 years her junior. Debate has raged for 150 years about whether Fuller and Giovanni Angelo Ossoli actually married or whether their son was illegitimate. Capper cautiously concludes that they likely did marry in 1848. Capper has crafted both an intimate life and a subtle analysis of Fuller's work. 36 b&w illus. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

"Superb."-Christopher Benfey, New York Review of Books

"With this second volume, Capper has established his preeminent position as the authority on Fuller....This is a triumph of great intellectual achievement, displaying an amazing depth of knowledge and admirable research." -Sally G. McMillen, Reviews in American History

"Capper's book makes us see that Fuller was finally not a romantic heroine but a historical creature, endowed with extraordinary capacities for making a place for herself.... Charles Capper finally brings Margaret Fuller back home, reclaiming her and her immense intelligence for America."-Christine Stansell, The New Republic

"This long-awaited second volume of Capper's Bancroft Prize-winning biography of Fuller fulfills all expectations .... Capper has crafted both an intimate life and a subtle analysis of Fuller's work." -Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Capper's magnificent biography restores Fuller as a transnational citizen of the liberal Atlantic world and as the first great American champion of cosmopolitan avant-garde culture." -Mary Loeffelholz, Boston Globe

"Our understanding of one of the most original and consequential 'men of letters' in 19th-century America--this country's first modern feminist--is as complete as the art of biography allows."-The Atlantic

"Charles Capper does not simply know about Margaret Fuller; he knows Fuller herself -her mind and heart, her hopes and fears. This biography is a monument to both its brilliant subject and her sensitive, perceptive biographer." -Daniel Walker Howe, author of What Hath God Wrought

"A triumph. A revolutionary, a feminist, an intellectual, a wife and a mother, Margaret Fuller lived a rich full life. This is a rich full account of it, easily the best life of Fuller ever written." -Robert D. Richardson, author of Emerson: The Mind on Fire

"A tour de force."-Mary Kelley, University of Michigan

"Will undoubtedly stand for generations to come as the authoritative biography of one of this nation's most important, influential women intellectuals." -Lawrence Buell, Harvard University

"This portrait of Fuller as a feminist and cosmopolitan cultural figure has been highly praised by historians."--New York Times Book Review

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 672 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (June 11, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195063139
• ISBN-13: 978-0195063134
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #694,244 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Captivating Book About A Captivating Woman, July 24, 2007

By 

CT (Minneapolis, MN USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life, Vol. 2: The Public Years (Hardcover)

I loved Charles Capper's first volume of his biography of Margaret Fuller and was pleased to find he has published this second volume, which I have found to be just as, if not more, satisfying than the first. Like the first, it's wonderfully readable and psychologically penetrating, but here Capper deals with Fuller's public life and its truly astonishing to read just how crucial Fuller's writings were for her contemporaries. I appreciated the way he plunges us into Fuller's fascinating world of Romantic writers and intellectuals on two continents, whose loves, revolutions, and spiritual searches make the life of the mind in history something living and breathing. From her launching of the first avant-garde magazine in America to her and her Italian husband and son's tragic drowning in a shipwreck 300 yards off Long Island, this book is totally captivating. I give it five stars plus!

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fuller Gets the Treatment, January 31, 2008

By 

Philip Brantingham (Chicago, IL) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life, Vol. 2: The Public Years (Hardcover)

Professor Charles Capper has put us in his debt for his thorough two-volume biography of Margaret Fuller, the female stormy petrel of early nineteenth century America. The second volume, which has just appeared, subtitled "The Public Years," is twice as large as the first, and contains a plethora of details of her later life. Perhaps, there are too many details for a general audience, in fact. For he has turned over every scrap of paper relating to this passionate intellectual and has used an enormous number of sources.
Volume Two begins with her editorship of The Dial and ends with her tragic end in a storm at sea, off the American eastern coast.
To some extent Margaret Fuller has not yet entered the mainstream of American literature, save for her feminist book "Woman in the Nineteenth Century." Yet she wrote poetry, fiction, translated works in German, and created some superb journalism. Her personal journals are a wonderful read. Most of this has fallen by the wayside, alas.
Capper's two volumes, under the title "Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life," can easily be considered the authoritative biography, replacing a half dozen earlier attempts to grasp the breadth of her work and life. After reading the two books, the reader can feel assured that he or she has a through knowledge of her troubled life. If I have any cavil, it's the excessive details and endless quotes that make reading a chore. This impedes the narrative flow.
For this is a scholarly biography, and as such not a colorful panorama of the subject's passage through life. Aside from this, I can only congratulate Professor Capper for a magnificent study of this outstanding woman's life. Now--to read her.

Philip Brantingham

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Capper Nails It, August 8, 2011

By 

Gail Stuart Rowe "G. S. Rowe" (Greeley, CO) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life, Vol. 2: The Public Years (Paperback)

Charles Capper has produced a thorough, judicious study of an important writer and critic in America's pre-Civil War cultural and literary circles. Capper is now the preeminent authority on Fuller, and his treatment will surely be viewed as the definitive work on her. It will take a brave soul to challenge his careful conclusions. Fuller, one of the most written about women in America's history, was a brilliant, complex figure. Unfortunately, her story has often been contorted to serve the interest of various writers and causes. Capper returns to the original sources left by Fuller and those who knew and associated with her to rethink her thoughts and behavior. Not only does he provide a compelling reading of Fuller, but he offers readers an entertaining and informative look into the intellectual community in which she worked and played. Capper's account is as striking as Fuller's own career as a revolutionary, a thinker, and America's first truly modern feminist. Although Capper writes clearly and at times engagingly, and the story he tells is riveting, his dense detail will challenge many readers. That said, this is one of the best biographies I've read in over a half century of reading biographies of American historical figures.