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Fuller was a child prodigy, rigorously trained in the classics
and modern languages and literatures by her father, who was
associated with the Transcendentalist circle of Concord, Massachusetts.
She edited Emerson's magazine, The Dial, from 1840
to 1842 and later, working as a literary critic for the New
York Tribune, became one of America's first self-supporting
woman journalists. Her Woman in the Nineteenth Century
(1845) made the argument that both men and women were confined
by the expectations of society; it remains a seminal work
on American feminism and sexual liberation. Fuller traveled
to Europe in 1846 as a foreign correspondent for the Tribune;
in Italy she became involved with revolutionaries and with
a nobleman, Giovanni Angelo Ossoli. When she became pregnant
in 1848, she attempted to hide her situation from friends
at home, but when Rome fell to France in 1849, she fled to
Florence with Ossoli, whom she married, and their child. The
family set sail for the United States in 1850. All three died
when their ship sank in sight of Fire Island, New York. |
