Minerva and the Muse: A Life of Margaret Fuller [Hardcover]

Joan Von Mehren (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1995

Writer, teacher, and outspoken feminist, Margaret Fuller (1810-1850) was a dynamic presence in American intellectual life. In this new biography, Joan van Mehren makes use of a wealth of new material to provide a sensitive portrait of Fuller's evolution as a woman and a writer.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Fuller (1810-1850), a journalist, critic and author of a pioneering treatise on women's rights (Women in the Nineteenth Century), is accorded a preeminent place in American intellectual history in this carefully researched, important study. Von Mehren, a freelance writer-scholar, details Fuller's evolution from child prodigy to leading New England intellectual. Her friendship with Ralph Waldo Emerson led to a position editing and writing literary criticism for the Dial, a transcendentalist journal. In 1840, she led a series of renowned "conversations" between influential Boston women on philosophical topics. In 1844, Fuller moved to New York City and became the first woman to write for Horace Greeley's Tribune. Greeley sent her to Europe, where she reported on the Italian revolution of 1845. Overcoming earlier disappointments in love, Fuller married Giovanni Ossoli, an Italian with whom she had a child. All three died tragically in a shipwreck off Fire Island while returning to the U.S. Photos.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

As the author acknowledges in the introduction, over the past dozen years the "Fuller revival has become a minor industry." In shaping her goods for this market, von Mehren focuses on Fuller's character: "her uncertainties about vocation, her search for intimacy and means of expression, and how her private life informed her evolving ideology about personal development and democratic culture." The author adopts a style her subject might have recognized, "fusing the form and some of the mannerisms of women's biography of the nineteenth century with the attitudes, values, and insights of the end of the twentieth century." Like the title, von Mehren's narrative stresses the dualities Fuller tried to harmonize, urging women (and striving herself) to develop "intellectual discipline, critical intelligence, and self-awareness" to balance their "already overdeveloped emotional, intuitional, divinatory, or Muse-like qualities." Minerva and the Muse is not an essential acquisition but should be considered by libraries with active women's studies or American studies collections. Mary Carroll

Product Details

• Hardcover: 398 pages
• Publisher: Univ of Massachusetts Pr (March 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0870239414
• ISBN-13: 978-0870239410
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.5 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,843,538 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A great portrait of a complicated woman, September 3, 2008

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Dark Romantic (Near Boston, MA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Minerva and the Muse: A Life of Margaret Fuller (Paperback)

Margaret Fuller, a feminist before feminism had been invented, struggled specifically for woman's rights for education and occupation. She believed that all women were made up of two parts: the Minerva, the intellectual side, and the Muse, the "femality" side. Von Mehren's biography tries to capture the essence of both aspects of Fuller, depicting her intelligence, her arrogance, her social awkwardness, her innovation, her impact, and her femininity.

In this book, Fuller is complex, struggling to reach her fullest potential as an intellectual, while serving as a harried caretaker to her family. Von Mehren expanded my own understanding of Fuller, allowing me to see her role outside of her feminist activism. The book brings to light Fuller's role as an important Transcendentalist (though she disliked the label) and as a revolutionary in Italy. Von Mehren does an especially good job in pulling the reader into the story of Fuller's sudden pregnancy and her deliberations to take care of her child in the midst of a rebellion that is not her own. From her upbringing and education "as a boy" to her tragic end, Fuller is presented by Von Mehren as a powerhouse figure of the nineteenth century who still retains a deep humanity.