Review: Margaret Fuller - A New American Life by Megan Marshall

Margaret Fuller
A New American Life
Author:  Megan Marshall
Published: March 2013
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Pages: 496
Category:  Biography
Format: Trade paperback (Advanced Reader's Copy)
ISBN 9780547195605

Thank you to the publisher and to TLC Book Tours for a complimentary copy of Margaret Fuller - A New American Life.  Receipt of such did not influence my opinion nor this review.

From an early age, Margaret Fuller dazzled New England’s intelligent elite. Her famous Conversations changed women’s sense of how they could think and live; her editorship of the Dial shaped American Romanticism. Now, Megan Marshall, whose acclaimed The Peabody Sisters “discovered” three fascinating women, has done it again: no biography of Fuller has made her ideas so alive or her life so moving.

Marshall tells the story of how Fuller, tired of Boston, accepted Horace Greeley’s offer to be the New York Tribune’s front-page columnist. The move unleashed a crusading concern for the urban poor and the plight of prostitutes, and a hunger for passionate experience. In Italy as a foreign correspondent, Fuller took a secret lover; wrote dispatches on the brutal 1849 Siege of Rome; and gave birth to a son.

When all three died in a shipwreck off Fire Island shortly after Fuller’s 40th birthday, the sense and passion of her life’s work were eclipsed by tragedy and scandal. Marshall’s inspired account brings an American heroine back to indelible life. (summary from TLC Book Tour site)

My Thoughts:

Megan Marshall's Margaret Fuller - A New American Life is a well researched and written biography of a rare lady, writer and early feminist.  Through correspondence and diaries amongst other sources, Margaret Fuller's extraordinary childhood and development to womanhood and beyond is written with meticulous attention to historical facts while giving life to the story of a woman who was amongst the trailblazers of her time.

Though her life was cut short at 40, Margaret found much success and helped pave the way for women everywhere in the work force.  A wife, mother, writer and genius; Margaret Fuller did find herself after struggling to find her own identity and remains an example to women everywhere to be and do what their heart desires.  

For lovers of memoirs, influential women in history, and/or inspirational biographies, Margaret Fuller - A New American Life is highly recommended.

MEGAN MARSHALL is the author of The Peabody Sisters, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic, New York Times Book Review, and Slate. A recipient of Guggenheim and NEH fellowships, Marshall teaches in the MFA program at Emerson College.