In 1843 Margaret Fuller, already a well-established figure in the Transcendental circle of Emerson and Thoreau, traveled by train, steamboat, carriage, and on foot to make a roughly circular tour of the Great Lakes. "Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 was Margaret Fuller's first original book-length work, the product of her journey through what was then considered the far western frontier in mid-nineteenth-century America... [The book] is, at least in part, an intensely personal account of Fuller's own inner life during the summer of 1843. She shared with the Transcendentalists the belief that internal travel—what Emerson called travel within the mind—was the most significant kind of journey. Her travel away from New England to visit such places as Niagara Falls, Mackinac Island, and Rock River, Illinois, is symbolic of a larger journey that Fuller was making in her mind: her departure from Emersonian idealism and her subsequent revision of Transcendentalism. The result is a particularly rich form of autobiography... Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 occupies a pivotal position in Margaret Fuller's development as a writer, a Transcendentalist, and a feminist. This portfolio of sketches, poems, stories, anecdotes, dialogues, reflections, and accounts of a leisurely journey to the Great Lakes is, at once, an external and an internal travelogue. Drawing on historical sources, contemporary travel books, and her own firsthand experience of life in prairie land, Fuller used the opportunity of visiting the frontier to meditate on the state of her own life and of life in America—both as they were and as she hoped they might become."—from the Introduction "Fuller gets directly to the essential spirit of the new land."—Babette Inglehart, Chicago State University
Author
Sarah Margaret Fuller Ossoli, more commonly known as Margaret Fuller, (May 23, 1810 – July 19, 1850) was a journalist, critic and women's rights activist associated with the American transcendental movement. She was the first full-time female book reviewer in journalism. Her book Woman in the Nineteenth Century is considered the first major feminist work in the United States. Born Sarah Margaret Fuller in an area of Cambridge, Massachusetts, she was given a substantial early education by her father, Timothy Fuller. She later had more formal schooling and became a teacher before, in 1839, she began overseeing what she called "conversations": discussions among women meant to compensate for their lack of access to higher education. She became the first editor of the transcendental publication The Dial in 1840 before joining the staff of the New York Tribune under Horace Greeley in 1844. By the time she was in her 30s, Fuller had earned a reputation as the best-read person in New England, male or female, and became the first woman allowed to use the library at Harvard College. Her seminal work, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, was published in 1845. A year later, she was sent to Europe for the Tribune as its first female correspondent. She soon became involved with the revolution in Italy and allied herself with Giuseppe Mazzini. She also met Giovanni Ossoli, with whom she had a child. All three members of the family died in a shipwreck off Fire Island, New York, traveling back to the United States in 1850. Fuller's body was never recovered. Fuller was an advocate of women's rights and, in particular, women's education and the right to employment. She also encouraged many other reforms in society, including prison reform and the emancipation of slaves in the United States. Many other advocates for women's rights and feminism, including Susan B. Anthony, cite Fuller as a source of inspiration. Many of her contemporaries, however, were not supportive, including her former friend Harriet Martineau, who said that Fuller was a talker rather than an activist. Shortly after Fuller's death her importance faded; the editors who prepared her letters to be published, believing her fame would be short-lived, were not concerned about accuracy and censored or altered much of her words before publication.
