The Margaret Fuller Legacy: America's First Feminist, 1810-1850

Hosted by James H. Bride, this overview of Margaret Fuller's life and work features authors including Megan Marshall (Margaret Fuller: A New American Life, which won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for biography) and Joan Von Mehren, who talk about Fuller's significance to literature and women's education against a backdrop of historic sights associated with Fuller and the 19th-century Transcendentalists. Considered one of the three leading Transcendentalists (along with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau), Fuller was the first editor of The Dial (1840–1844), which was originally conceived as a philosophical journal. Fuller's well-attended weekly “Conversations” in Boston encouraged women to read, write, think independently, and act on issues of the day. Her 1844 book Summer on the Lakes was, in Marshall's words, “an ardent plea for environmentalism [and] the plight of the Indian.” Fuller also argued for gender equality in her landmark Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), and penned numerous essays calling for social reforms. She was the first literary editor of the New York Tribune and the first American foreign correspondent in Europe, earning fame for her reportage. Aside from Mrs. Emerson's irritation over Fuller's friendship with Ralph Waldo, controversies are largely ignored here (and instead of Fuller's own words, viewers will see stills of pages from her publications that allow only a quick peek at her literary style). Nonetheless, this is a heartfelt and informative introduction to a major historical figure who is not always given her due. Recommended. Aud: H, C, P. (M. Puffer-Rothenberg)