Margaret Fuller
Life and career
Margaret Fuller was born in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, in 1810 and received an intensive education from her father. From 1839 she led paid discussions for women whose access to formal higher education was restricted. She became the first editor of The Dial, translated German literature, and worked as a critic and journalist. Woman in the Nineteenth Century appeared in 1845, arguing for women's freedom to develop their capacities beyond relationships with men. She died in a shipwreck in 1850. Her combination of conversation, criticism and reform gives her prose an active purpose: inherited judgments become claims that other voices can examine and challenge.
Criticism as an encounter
Fuller's experience of conversation and reviewing gives literary judgment an active social setting. A book can provoke an inquiry into the possibilities available to a person, rather than merely receive a verdict about its merits. Her interests in German literature, reform and women's intellectual independence meet in this habit of examining inherited standards. The different forms in her collected writing preserve that range. A review, a narrative and a poem can approach questions of self-development through quite different relations with their readers.
Life Without and Life Within
Arthur B. Fuller assembled this collection after Margaret Fuller's death. Reviews of Goethe, Frederick Douglass and Emerson stand alongside narratives, essays and poems. That variety makes the volume useful for encountering her as a working critic rather than reducing her career to a single argument. The editorial arrangement is also part of the reading experience. Prefaces and notes belong to another voice, while the title suggests a relation between outward circumstances and inward life that the individual pieces explore in different ways.
Compare two kinds of judgment
Place a literary review beside a more personal or imaginative piece. What does Fuller praise in each: independence, sympathy, learning, honesty or some other capacity? Notice whether the grounds of judgment change with the form. Then distinguish her own claims from the editor's account of her purposes. This preserves the value of the collection without turning it into a continuous autobiography. Its connections emerge through comparison among separate acts of writing, each with a particular occasion and audience.