Several years ago when I had my Emerson project and read through all of his essays and then read a biography about him, there was the interesting person of Margaret Fuller. Reading about Emerson, Fuller seemed a strong-willed woman who was in love with him and also shamelessly flirted with all the other Concord men. So back in early December when I was perusing NetGalley to see if there was anything particularly interesting to read, I came across The Lives of Margaret Fuller by John Matteson. Since the book is published by Norton and Matteson won a Pulitzer in 2008 for his book Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father, I figured the biography of Fuller would be a good one. And it is.

My impression of her from reading about Emerson turned out to be completely wrong. She is definitely strong-willed, but she was not in love with Emerson nor did she flirt shamelessly with anyone. In fact, most people, especially men, didn’t like her much. She was not a very attractive woman, had a curved spine, squinted from nearsightedness, fought with her weight her whole life, suffered from bad skin as a teenager, and was pretty much smarter than everyone she else and liked them to know it.

Born Sarah Margaret on May 23, 1810, she was the first child of Timothy Fuller and Margarett Crane Fuller. Timothy had high educational ambitions for his daughter, unusual at the time. He taught her himself and was quite exacting. When Fuller was six, Timothy began teaching her both English and Latin grammar. Not long after that he started her on Greek. By the age of nine she was “reading a compendious list of histories and biographies in English, as well as many of the major works in the Latin canon.” Lucky for Fuller she was very much a child-genius and sucked up the lessons like a Hoover.

As her mother began to have more children, several of which were boys, and as her father got elected to Congress and spent more and more time away, Fuller was no longer the center of her parents’ attention. She genuinely enjoyed learning, but it also became a means for her to garner some small bit of affection from her father and mother.

But so much studying took its toll on her health. She began to suffer from migraines as well as nightmares. As an adult she often wished that her parents had insisted she spend time outdoors running around in the fresh air to counter all the time she spent studying and reading.

Eventually her father enrolled her at Cambridge Port Private Grammar School, a boys’ college preparatory school that admitted girls on a part-time basis. Fuller’s competitive nature and desire to excel and impress her father came to the fore. While being the smartest student in school is great, she had no social skills and no friends. She was lonely, and because she knew she was smarter than everybody she conducted herself with an air of superiority that kept anyone from being inclined to like her.

So Margaret was sent off to Miss Susan Prescott’s Young Ladies’ Seminary to learn how to be a lady. To say she resented this would be an understatement. But Fuller was taken under the wing of Miss Prescott herself who also believed in serious instruction. Fuller made a few friends, though her penchant for making scathing remarks about her peers made it difficult to keep even the friends she did make.

Fuller left Miss Prescott’s just before her fifteenth birthday. He mother wanted her back at home to help take care of and teach her younger siblings. This is when her formal schooling ended and her self-education began.

Oh, how I’ve gone on about her childhood, but it is these early years that really shaped the woman she became.

Her self-education took the form of reading everything she could get her hands on. She discovered Goethe, like so many others about that time, and considered him a model for how she would like to shape her own intellect. She became friends with some leading intellectuals and was able to publish some translations of Goethe and planned to write a biography about him.

In 1835 at the age of 25, she came very close to dying from typhoid. Just days after she began to recover, her father died of cholera. Her mother didn’t know anything about running the farm her father had bought to “retire” to. Margaret stepped up and tried to learn the business but as a woman she had no legal powers and her uncle took over administering the estate. Far from being caring and sympathetic, he held the purse strings tight and would not give Margaret or her mother money for things he did not agree with. So Fuller decided it was time she tried to earn her own money before her uncle starved them all.

And here I will stop and continue tomorrow. I didn’t plan on writing so much but Fuller is such a fascinating woman that I can’t help myself.