Margaret Fuller, Vol. 1 by Charles Capper

Product Details

Synopsis

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 first-hand 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.

"The double focus of 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 classical, republican, romantic and Transcentalist thought that influenced hers. Hence he is more able than any previous biographer to do justice to the nuances of her aesthetic commitments and to her religious, political and social thought."--The Nation
"Her short, dramatic life seems to invite constant reinterpretation, and manybiographers have been drawn to it. Charles Capper is the latest and the best of them: his treatment of her life, and especially her work, marks an important break with his predecessors....Eminently readable...Illuminating."--Women's Review of Books
"At last, a definitive biography of the great American feminist writer Margaret Fuller. Only a scholar of uncommon learning, like Charles Capper, could have dealt with so formidably learned a subject and located her in the intellectual world of her times."--Daniel Walker Howe, Oxford University
"Charles Capper has written an engrossing biography which conveys the adventure of Margaret Fuller's life and the complexity of her thought. It places Fuller solidly among the major writers and intellectuals of her generation. And it is a good read!"--Linda K. Kerber, University of Iowa
"Charles Capper has written the best biography of Fuller yet. He has skillfully re-created early nineteenth-century American literary and cultural life, and placed Fuller within it. The research is superb, the writing gracious. This book will stand the test of time."--Joel Myerson, The University of South Carolina
"On the basis of the first volume alone it is clear that Charles Capper's biography of Margaret Fuller will remain definitive for the foreseeable future. More than a comprehensive and moving biography, it provides a fresh look of the origins of American Romanticism and a sensitive examination of the relationship between femininity and intellectuality within nineteenth-century culture."--Ruth H. Bloch, University of California, Los Angeles
"This admirably-researched biography is certain to become the place of first resort for anyone wishing to ascertain the facts of Margaret Fuller's life."--Lawrence Buell, Harvard University
"Capper's lively prose enriches Fuller's story and leaves readers eager for the second volume in his account of this extraordinary woman's life."--Magill Book Reviews
"Extraordinarily well-written...This intricate exploration of personality through the lens of Fuller's relations with others in her circle allows Capper to re-create the social medium in which the cultural phenomenon of Transcendentalism took shape."--Jane H. Pease, American Historical Review
"In this extraordinarily well-written first volume of a projected two-part biography, Charles Capper bids fair to revivify the life-and-times model of intellectual history and, by interweaving Margaret Fuller's writing and experience with that of the men and women with whom she interacted, to expand the scope within which nineteenth-century women's lives have generally been reconstructed."--Jane H. Pease, American Historical Review

Annotation

First in a 2-part biography of 19th-century transcendentalist and feminist leader. Based on a thorough examination of first-hand sources, this book focuses on Fuller's difficult identity as a female intellectual during her gradual but fascinating emergence from private life. "Eminently readable."--Women's Review of Books. 30 photos.

Biography

Charles Capper is Associate Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is co-editor of The American Intellectual Tradition.

Boston University