Customer Reviews

Woman in the Nineteenth Century (Dover Thrift Editions)

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Not enough people read Margaret Fuller anymore. She was the first great female American intellectual. She lived a fascinating life and died a tragic death. She also wrote a classic of early feminist thinking, Woman in the Nineteenth Century -- required reading for anyone who cares about the history of women's rights. However, this is a book that you absolutely should NOT try to read in a Dover thrift edition. Fuller's references to her own reading and her historical moment are legion, and they are guaranteed to confuse the heck out of anyone who lacks deep background in the study of pre-Civil War American culture. The great virtue of Dover editions is that they are cheap. Their great disadvantage is that they offer no critical apparatus to help with comprehension. And Oh! does Fuller require critical apparatus. Without a hefty array of footnotes to guide you through, you are very likely to find this book opaque and frustrating. You may very well end up hating a book that greatly deserves to be loved. Go for the Norton Critical Edition instead -- it's well worth the extra investment!!

No, seriously... how audacious can you be? She was a beautiful writer and a brilliant women who stole the hearts of every great mind in Concord in her day. She had a lovely and simplistic sense of logic and could reference great works from every corner of the world with ease. You can not fail to learn from her and that is why she should be read, I think.

I read Fuller's book together with American Bloomsbury by Susan Cheever. I must say it was one of the least enjoyable reading experiences I have ever had, reminding me of some of the obsolete literary styles I had to plow through in graduate school. The prose was mannered, self-conscious and pretentious, much I fear in the manner valued by her Transcendentalist contemporaries. When I read American Bloomsbury I found that Cheever appropriately described Fuller's writing as "turgid, quotation/ridden prose". I do not recommend it unless you are writing a thesis on mid-nineteenth century American thought or on the history of feminism.