Fembio Special: Famous Italian Women
Margaret Fuller
(married name Marchesa d'Ossoli)
born on May 23, 1810 in Cambridge, Massachusetts/ United States
drowned on July 19, 1850 near Fire Island in the United States, in a shipwreck
American writer, journalist and feminist
215th birthday on May 23, 2025
175th anniversary of her death on July 19, 2025
Biography
Once called “the most remarkable and, in some respects, greatest woman America has yet seen,” Margaret Fuller was an idiosyncratic and outstanding figure in the religious, social, and literary history of the United States. The eldest of nine children, she received a strict, “male” education from her father, a lawyer and politician.
After briefly attending a girls' school, she continued her education on her own and became known as a kind of all-round genius and brilliant conversationalist. After her father's death in 1835, Margaret Fuller began teaching, while also studying German philosophy and translating, among other things, Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe. Together with Emerson and others, Fuller developed the ideas of transcendentalism; she worked as an editor and author for Dial, the movement's journal. From 1839 to 1844, Fuller earned her living by teaching classes of “conversations” for women on a wide range of topics, including women's rights. Her progressive ideas, published in 1845 under the title Woman in the Nineteenth Century, directly influenced the 1848 Seneca Falls Women's Rights Convention. The work is a classic of American feminism.
From 1844, Margaret Fuller worked as a literary critic and commentator for the New York Tribune, and her essays set a high standard for practical social criticism in the United States. She was soon able to travel to Europe as a foreign correspondent for the Tribune, meeting with personalities such as William Wordsworth, Giuseppe Mazzini, George Sand and Fréderic Chopin.
Fuller became more and more interested in the politics of pre-revolutionary Europe. In Italy, she fell in love with Giovanni Angelo, Marchese d'Ossoli, who was ten years her junior and a champion of the cause of freedom. They married and Fuller gave birth to a son in 1848. She became increasingly involved in the Italian struggle for freedom and when the Roman Republic was proclaimed in 1849, she took charge of an emergency hospital. After the fall of the republic, the family lived in Florence before leaving for America, where Margaret, the family breadwinner, planned to publish a book on the European revolutions. Just two hours from New York, Margaret Fuller, her husband and son died in a shipwreck near Fire Island, about a hundred meters from the beach.
(Text from 1989; translated with DeepL.com; edited by Ramona Fararo, 2025. Please consult the German version for additional information, pictures, sources, videos, and bibliography.)
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