Margaret Fuller An American Romantic Life [Paperback]

With this first volume of a two-part biography of the Transcendentalist critic and feminist leader, Margaret Fuller, Capper has launched the premier modern biography of early America's best-known intellectual woman. Based on a thorough examination of all the firsthand sources, many of them never before used, this volume is filled with original portraits of Fuller's numerous friends and colleagues and the influential movements that enveloped them. Writing with a strong narrative sweep, Capper focuses on the central problem of Fuller's life--her identity as a female intellectual--and presents the first biography of Fuller to do full justice to its engrossing subject. This first volume chronicles Fuller's private years : her gradual, tangled, but fascinating emergence out of the private life of family, study, Boston-Cambridge socializing, and anonymous magazine-writing, to the beginnings of her rebirth as antebellum America's female prophet-critic.
Capper's biography is at once an evocative portrayal of an extraordinary woman and a comprehensive study of an avant-garde American intellectual type at the beginning of its first creation.

Charles Capper's first volume of a projected two-volume life offers much detail to help us appreciate a remarkable mind....Scholars of this period should value Capper's clarity as well as his thoroughness; and feminists should rejoice that Margaret Fuller's history has been enlarged and deepened. --Historical Journal of Massachusetts

Capper's study emerges as the authoritative account of Fuller's early life for its original and timely scholarship, rich historical texture, and balanced interpretations. Capper writes in an engaging style that gives vitality to the life of thought he chronicles. --Legacy

This inherently feminist book results in the richest account we have yet of Fuller's formative years....Capper matches Fuller (and she was an astounding reader) in his study of the cllm