Customer Reviews

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

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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!

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

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.