Finding Margaret Fuller: A Novel

Margaret Fuller was a well-known figure during her lifetime, so her absence from the pantheon of American literary greats is perplexing. Any survey course on American literature will undoubtedly include Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne as required reading. However, Fuller, who was fully embedded in the transcendentalist circle, typically isn’t even mentioned. Her book Woman in the Nineteenth Century launched the first wave of feminism in the US, yet she’s rarely credited with that achievement. After attending Fuller’s Conversations series, Elizabeth Cady Stanton was inspired to stage the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, eventually attracting the support of Susan B. Anthony. These two women alone are usually considered the mothers of American feminism.

Allison Pataki’s Finding Margaret Fuller is a fictional account of Fuller’s life that seeks to raise her profile among contemporary readers. Pataki uses the genre of historical fiction rather than factual biography to tell the tale of Fuller’s life. In doing so, she takes some liberties that might color our understanding of her subject.