From a Q & A about the book at the author's website:
What’s new in Margaret Fuller: A New American Life?Learn more about the book and author at Megan Marshall's website.
Margaret Fuller’s life story is as dramatic and inspiring as any I can think of–she was a brilliant thinker and writer, the comrade of Emerson and Thoreau, a pioneering journalist and daring feminist who lived out her ideals on a global stage. Then all of this ended for her inshipwreck and scandal at age forty. Writing a biography that captured the drama yet was true to the facts and conveyed the full complexity of Fuller’s ideas was the challenge I set myself.
Relying on scholarship of the past three decades, which has made Fuller’s letters, journals, and all her published writing easily accessible, I drew connections between private correspondence and public testimony that helped me recreate key moments in her life in vivid new ways—her controversial relationship with Emerson, her secret love affair with Giovanni Ossoli, her anguish over leaving her infant son with a wet nurse in the Italian countryside while she covered the Roman revolution as the first woman war correspondent. All of these episodes stood out to me clearly, at last, as I worked directly with her words from so many sources.
And there were important new finds as well: a letter Emerson wrote two weeks after Fuller’s death listing Thoreau’s findings at...[read on]
Marshall's first biography, The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism, won the Francis Parkman Prize, the Mark Lynton History Prize, the Massachusetts Book Award in Nonfiction, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in biography and memoir.
The Page 99 Test: The Peabody Sisters.
Writers Read: Megan Marshall (October 2007).
My Book, The Movie: Margaret Fuller: A New American Life.
--Marshal Zeringue