Biography
Without question, Sarah Margaret Fuller was one of the most extraordinary minds of the nineteenth century. Her prose writings include Summer on the Lakes, in 1843, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), and the posthumous collection Life Without and Life Within (1859). With a superb individual education and at the forefront of the Transcendentalist movement (albeit from her own perspective), she sought to extend her educational opportunities to others as a teacher in experimental schools (headed by another Transcendentalist, Bronson Alcott) and through her Boston "Conversations" in which she sought to extend critical and philosophical thinking to adult women who were denied opportunities for higher education.
In addition to prose writings, she published several poems in The Dial, as its first editor. She expanded her public role when she became a journalist for the New York Tribune (1844-47); that position led her to Rome in 1847-48 where she became a compatriot of the revolutionary leaders and reported on the Italian Revolution as the only U.S. reporter (male or female) to remain in Rome during the war. She and her husband, Count Ossoli, and their infant son all died in a shipwreck off Fire Island on their return from Rome; the history of the revolution that she was writing at the time was also lost in the wreck. Few women had such broad public roles and influence in the 19th c.; the leaders of the first Women's Rights Convention in Seneca Falls in 1848 cited Fuller's courage in taking on a public role and advocating equality as instrumental to their own work.--Sharon M. Harris
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