The Impersonal Lives of Margaret Fuller: A Problem of Biography

Abstract

In 1852, two years after Margaret Fuller’s death, Emerson, Channing, and Clarke published her first biography, and arranged the text in such a way that it could be read as her autobiography. The Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli is a pastiche of Fuller’s journal entries, letters, and excerpts from her published and unpublished works, interspersed by the editors’ explanatory commentary, and supplemented by their own lengthy impressions and memories of her. The Margaret Fuller that emerges from this patchwork is a sickly, asexual woman, confused about her religious allegiances, intellectually stellar, but often misunderstood. In 1884, Fuller’s brother Arthur added an Appendix and a Preface to the second edition of the Memoirs in which he claimed that “[Margaret] never would have published the sketch [which portrays their father as a “stern and exacting” disciplinarian] without such modifications as would have shown our father to have been a most judicious and tender one.”1 The editorial method of the Memoirs, which compiles Fuller’s life narrative from her first-person material and offers it as the personal memoirs she never wrote (and would have probably “modified”) raises an important question about genre: should the titular memoirs refer to Margaret’s own memories of her life, or to the editors’ and her brother’s memories of Margaret?