On the stormy night of June 19, 1850, the freighter Elizabeth ran aground on a sandbar near Long Island, New York. In the high wind and surf, only a few of the ship’s passengers managed to reach shore alive. One of the dead was the American philosopher, social reformer, and adventurer Margaret Fuller (1810–1850), who was returning home from Italy aboard the doomed ship.
Fuller, who was forty years old at the time of her drowning, was a member of the Transcendental Club, an early nineteenth-century philosophical movement centered in Boston. She was also known for writing Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), one of the earliest feminist works in American intellectual history.
Fuller was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and educated by her father, congressman Timothy Fuller (1778–1835). He drilled her in literature, music, and Greek, a grueling schedule that left her exhausted. “I was often kept up till very late; and as he was a severe teacher, both from his habits of mind and his ambition for me, my feelings were kept on the stretch till the recitations were over,” she later wrote.
At age twenty-six, she met the philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), who invited her to contribute to the transcendentalist magazine The Dial, an influential journal that published such writers as Emerson, Bronson Alcott (1799–1888), and Elizabeth Peabody (1804–1894). Fuller became the journal’s editor in 1839. In an 1843 issue of the magazine, Fuller wrote an essay titled “The Great Lawsuit: Man vs. Men and Woman vs. Women.” She expanded the article two years later into Woman in the Nineteenth Century, which argued for women’s equality.
Fuller’s work impressed New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley (1811–1872), who hired her to write dispatches about a revolutionary movement in Italy. While in Italy, she fell in love with an Italian nobleman and revolutionary leader, the Marchese Giovanni Angelo Ossoli. The couple had a son, Angelo, in 1848.
After the revolution failed, the family was forced to flee Rome and decided to move back to the United States. Ossoli and their infant son were accompanying Fuller aboard the Elizabeth; all of them perished in the shipwreck.
ADDITIONAL FACTS
- Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864), who disliked Fuller, supposedly based two fictional characters on her: Zenobia in The Blithedale Romance (1852) and Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter (1850).
- Fuller’s grandnephew was Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983), who invented the geodesic dome.
- After the wreck of the Elizabeth, Emerson sent the writer Henry Thoreau (1817–1862) to search for Fuller’s remains. He was unable to find anything at the site, but a monument to Fuller was erected in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
