Charles Capper (1) (1944–2021)

Margaret Fuller was an important person on the American literary scene in the first half of the nineteenth century, and an early advocate, partly from the force of her circumstances, of equality, even to the extent of androgyny apparently, of women and men. She stirred the Unitarian and Transcendentalist pot. Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life, Vol. 2: The Public Years by Charles Capper unfolds in exquisite detail the later years of her short life as she published and became broadly known both in the United States and in Europe.

The book is dense. The subject has her own life; her life is set in a rich historical period; her thinking on matters is detailed and careful. Capper captures all of that and how they relate one to the other. She was a democratic socialist and supported European, especially Italian, revolution. At the same time she called for a mature literary culture in the United States. She was so well informed that I am sorry she died before her intellect was used up, but there were people who thought her early death was to her advantage. Interested though I was I was not happy reading the last chapter of this work.

The two volume work by Capper seems to be the standard. Margaret Fuller: A New American Life by Megan Marshall has won the Pulitzer Prize and was in today's mail. I have read Marshall's book on The Peabody Sisters and have some hope for the newer book.… (altro)

There is a recent Pulitzer Prize winning biography of Margaret Fuller, but the life listed in the bibliographies of books on transcendentalism list most often the two volume work by Charles Capper. Last night I finished the first volume: Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life, Vol. 1: The Private Years. First, Margaret Fuller was a difficult child, difficult in different ways as an adult, and a remarkable adult. Second, this is a remarkably adroit telling of her life through her initiation as a transcendentalist as editor at about 30 of The Dial. She was a polyglot, with special knowledge of Latin, French, German, and Italian, who fully absorbed the whole wide range of the literature she read. She was an intense friend with high expectations of the people she dealt with. She looked, in particular, for a meaningful life by which she meant a life as full as a man's, not just domestic and social certainty. She succeeded importantly, in part thanks to the transcendentalists, but as I shall see in the next volume she died too young.… (altro)