Fuller's Return
I’ve lived with Margaret Fuller as my shadow sister since I first read about her in high school many years ago. Her brilliance and moral passion excited me, but what excited me more was that she was a woman demanding to be heard in an age when women had no access to higher education, or to employment that would allow them to use what they knew. I was a privileged girl in Akron Ohio, I was headed for college and a career. But I felt Margaret’s constraints as my own, and the more I learned about her, the closer I felt. We even shared quirky personal characteristics – physical and social awkwardness as teenagers, migraine and scoliosis (hers much worse than mine), even disastrous Sweet Sixteen parties at which we both misbehaved horribly because we didn’t understand, or didn’t accept, conventional social norms.
Margaret Fuller was successful despite her constraints. Her 1845 book WOMAN IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY sparked the American feminist movement led by women she had taught and inspired. She was the first female editor of a major national newspaper, The New York Tribune, the first female foreign correspondent, the first female war correspondent. Her columns in the Tribune ranged from cultural events to prison reform to the oppression of women and Blacks. When she moved to Europe in 1846, her scope widened. She covered the 1848 rebellions against autocracy that consumed the continent, living them ardently during the Siege of Rome as her lover fought for a united republican Italy, and she herself ran a war hospital for wounded soldiers. Her journalism opened minds and charted history. It is still relevant today.
But her public life was brief. When she died in a shipwreck in 1850, she was forty years old. More than a century later, as a young girl with little sense of the world, I mourned her loss. I still do. FULLER’S RETURN is my way of repairing that loss. It offers Margaret in fiction what death denied her in reality: a life fully lived in the crucial ten years before the Civil War.
Writing the novel was a constant revelation. I felt as if I had a special invitation to history, offered by one of its most fascinating participants. And one of its funniest. In her day, Margaret Fuller’s wit was so sharp it antagonized people who couldn’t tolerate its accuracy. In our day, it’s terrific company. FULLER’S RETURN is a book filled with death and oppression and war, but it’s also about a stalwart woman who, transcending all constraint, found mission and friendship and love and hilarity, and the joy that makes grief tolerable.
FULLER’S RETURN is represented by Gail Hochman at Brandt & Hochman Literary Agents.