Book of the week: Margaret Fuller: A New American Life by Megan Marshall

(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $30)

Margaret Fuller accomplished more in her 40 years than most people could in several lifetimes, said Judith Thurman in The New Yorker. By the time she died in an 1850 shipwreck off Long Island, N.Y., she had established herself as America’s first female public intellectual and had written a book, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, that would become “a foundational work of feminist history.” When a revolution broke out in Italy while she was on assignment there, she simultaneously reported on the war for the New-York Tribune and ran a hospital for wounded soldiers. But while such feats have made Fuller “a rock star of women’s studies programs,” the general public barely knows of her, despite several stellar previous biographies. Now “the fine storyteller” Megan Marshall has given Fuller her best chance yet to triumph over obscurity once and for all.

As “seductive as it is impressive,” this volume makes the most of Fuller’s eventful life, said Dwight Garner in The New York Times. The daughter of a Harvard-educated lawyer who rigorously, if tyrannically, homeschooled her, Fuller was translating the works of Cicero and Virgil by age 10. Upon reaching adulthood, she was working as a schoolteacher when she began to write and publish the essays that earned her fame. Soon she’d befriend Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau and assume the editorship of the Transcendentalists’ literary journal. And as Fuller becomes a player on the world stage, Marshall’s account “has the grain and emotional amplitude of a serious novel.” Only in the final third, when Fuller takes a younger Italian lover, does Marshall slip. Her prose, “usually so crisp, edges toward the overripe.”

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At times, that final act “reads like an 1830s version of Sex and the Country,” said Susan Cheever in TheDailyBeast.com. Fuller, insecure in her looks, was a very late bloomer in romance, experiencing mostly frustration until she met Giovanni Ossoli in her late 30s in Italy and gave birth to their child. This bred such concern about scandal that, after the shipwreck, many of her friends deemed her lucky to be dead. But Marshall labels Fuller’s choice of pleasure over appearances as “the most radical of her life so far.” Any reader of Marshall’s “nuanced, compassionate portrait” can’t help but wonder what Fuller might have accomplished had she not died during her return to America, said Kate Tuttle in The Boston Globe. The multivolume history of Rome she was writing was never found.