Before Martha Gellhorn covered the Spanish Civil War with Ernest Hemingway, before Susan Sontag hunkered down during the siege of Sarajevo to direct a production of "Waiting for Godot," Margaret Fuller (1810-50), author of "Woman in the Nineteenth Century" and intrepid reporter for the New York Tribune, drowned in a shipwreck with her husband and their child on her way home to deliver her masterpiece about the revolutions in Italy.
FICTION: "Miss Fuller," by April Bernard
Novel captures spirit of pioneering journalist Margaret Fuller
By CARL ROLLYSON
Recent biographers have plumbed Fuller's life, teeming with incidents and arresting personalities (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Tribune editor Horace Greeley, revolutionary leader Giuseppi Mazzini), but their endeavors lack the spare elegance of April Bernard's novel. Not only does the intimate side of Fuller's life emerge in her own voice, but so does her precarious status among her prejudiced fellow writers. Henry David Thoreau treated her with studied courtesy, and Nathaniel Hawthorne dismissed her with outright hostility, suspecting her of engaging in an affair with a Jew in New York City and in a bogus marriage to an Italian nobleman.
An uneven stylist, Fuller nevertheless wrote passages of uncommon poetry and passion that Bernard employs with considerable finesse: "Those who till a spot of earth scarcely larger than is wanted for a grave, have deserved that the sun should shine upon its sod til violets answer.
about the writer
CARL ROLLYSON
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