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

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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!