These Sad But Glorious Days: Dispatches From Europe, 1846-1850 [Hardcover]

Margaret Fuller (Author), Professor Larry J. Reynolds (Editor), Professor Susan Belasco Smith (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 25, 1991

Margaret Fuller - journalist, critic, radical feminist, and political activist - travelled in Europe between 1846 and 1850 as a foreign correspondent for the New York Tribune. Her letters from England, France, and Italy, which began as engaging travel sketches, soon became moving accounts of the most widespread revolutionary upheaval within modern history. These dispatches are now reproduced in their entirety for the first time. Fuller met important political figures wherever she travelled, including those who became leaders in the revolutions, and she actively allied herself with the republican cause. Her letters describe how from her apartment in Rome she saw the November 1848 attack on the Quirinal Palace, which precipitated the Pope's flight from the city and the establishment of the Roman Republic headed by her friend Giuseppe Mazzini; how she and the Romans (who included her lover Giovanni Ossoli, a captain in the Civic guard) suffered through the June 1849 siege and bombardment of Rome by the French army sent to restore the Pope; and how as director of a hospital on Tiber Island, she nursed the wounded who fell in the defense of the city. The dispatches, edited and annotated by Larry J. Reynolds and Susan Belasco Smith, are introduced by an essay explaining the historical and professional context in which the letters were written.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 342 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press; First Edition edition (December 25, 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300050380
• ISBN-13: 978-0300050387
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.5 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,419,695 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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5.0 out of 5 stars Eyewitness to History, July 14, 2010

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This review is from: These Sad But Glorious Days: Dispatches From Europe, 1846-1850 (Paperback)

Margaret Fuller is one of the great tragedies of the mid-19th century: prominent and respected female member of the transcendentalist group, passionate observer and participant in her times, but her life cut short in a shipwreck just as she was ready to open what promised to be the greatest period of achievement in her life. She got the assignment to report from Italy for the New York Daily Tribune at just the right time. She settled in and then witnessed the Revolution of 1848, sending dispatches back to be printed in the Tribute and thus distributed to the largest readership in America. The dispatches are reprinted in this volume and one can experience the exhilaration and then the despair Fuller says she felt as she watched the hope, the glory and ultimately the failure and tragedy of the Roman Revolution of 1848. She did not write at the time about her passionate love affair with a handsome Italian Count, or about their love child, but one can read between the lines and the editor fills in with documented facts from other sources.

After she finally publicly took responsibility for her relationship with Count Ossoli, and for their child, Fuller prepared a manuscript history of the events of 1848, and brought it all back to the United States -- only to perish along with family and manuscript within sight of the US coast.

One reads Fuller's passionate writings in this volume and wishes to read that vanished manuscript, and wishes passionately that she had been able to write more and share her perspective on the developing events in the United States in the following decade. What a tragedy she did not live longer!