Fuller in Her Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of Her Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates

Edited by Joel Myerson
University of Iowa Press

In early nineteenth century America, Margaret Fuller was considered a radical. She was an educated woman, a journalist, and a women’s rights activist. She supported the emancipation of slaves. She married an Italian revolutionary, ten years her junior. She upheld the extremist belief that women had the capacity for intellectual enhancement. Later, notables in early American feminism would pay homage to Fuller for her struggle for women to receive higher education. Much like many other feminist activists, Fuller’s place in history has, for the most part, been shelved, dusted off, and rediscovered by scholars. This is exactly what Joel Myerson does with Fuller in Her Own Time.

This book is a compilation of over thirty transcribed letters, journal entries, and conversations from men and women. The list of posthumous contributors includes famous nineteenth century writers like Edgar Allen Poe, Harriet Martineau, and Henry James. Most of these contributors recorded Fuller in a different stage of her life, from her early career as a teacher to her talks with female prisoners in Sing Sing.

Myerson, a professor at the University of South Carolina, claims that since Fuller wasn’t popular in her own time, much of what was written about her came after her death and “the resulting portrait was of an intellectually aloof woman…who pursued aesthetic pleasures until she married and became fulfilled as a mother.” This book is Myerson’s attempt at giving Fuller her due by presenting her as her contemporaries saw her: a multifaceted woman. She encouraged her female students to think – “she did not care what they thought but she very much wanted them to think” – and they in return found her inspiring and intimidating. Writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne found her to be an “intellectually aggressive woman,” while others such as Ralph Waldo Emerson discovered she could be serious and humorous.

While the subject deserves a standing ovation, I have to say that his book, at best, deserves polite applause. Myerson does prove his point, but I don’t care for his methods of demonstration. He chooses only to act as an editor; he merely organizes these texts by date and displays them for his readers without doing much else. His voice is too detached and almost nonexistent aside from a short introduction and brief biographies of Fuller’s contemporaries.

Fuller in Her Own Time has material that could have been used for an interesting narrative biography on Fuller, catering to both a general and scholastic audience. Instead, it is mostly just an exhibition of archival and scholastic research. The book’s lack of authorial voice is likely to dissuade many readers, even ones who are interested in the time period. With that said, I can only recommend this book to someone researching or writing about Fuller.

Review by Farhana Uddin