Margaret Fuller Read Online Free
Author: Megan Marshall
mother’s hand had planted them, and they bloomed for me.”Like Persephone, she is free above ground during the two seasons her father is away, when her mother’s “flower-like nature” prevails, when she need answer only to Timothy’s exhorting letters.
In this third letter she begins to test Timothy’s strictures. Twice before she has written asking his permission to read an Italian thriller, Zeluco, and twice she has recommended for his own reading a novel—“Do not let the name novel make you think it is either trifling or silly,” she urges—called Hesitation: or, To Marry, or Not to Marry? In the pages of Hesitation she has encountered, along with the novel’s pair of indecisive lovers, the extraordinary comtesse de Pologne, a witty conversationalist, happily single, with the “power to disengage herself from the shackles of custom, without losing one attribute of modesty”: a woman whose personal magnetism draws both men and women to her circle.Does she hope Timothy will find the comtesse too and approve?
Sarah Margaret is writing fiction herself, “a new tale called The young satirist,” she tells her father, in the loose rolling hand she has acquired only recently, which will be recognizably hers from now on.Despite Timothy’s criticisms, she is beginning to feel how bright she is, even brilliant, a commanding presence in her mind’s eye, if not in daily life—the tall girl will soon reach five feet two inches and stop growing, becoming short, plump, and awkward as an adolescent. She too can play the critic, the provocateur, the “young satirist,” when she wishes. She is nine years old. Her mother, Margarett, just thirty, is newly pregnant with a fifth child. She closes her letter:
P S I do not like Sarah, call me Margaret alone, pray do!
2
Ellen Kilshaw
T HE FIRST LETTER SHE WROTE AND SIGNED “MARGARET,” even before she asked her father to “call me Margaret alone” (which he refused to do), was sent to Ellen Kilshaw, “first friend.”Ellen was older, a grown woman in her early twenties, “an English lady, who, by a singular chance, was cast upon this region for a few months,” Margaret would write years later, unconsciously adopting the language of the romantic novels she loved as a girl.And why not? She had fallen in love with Ellen Kilshaw: “Elegant and captivating, her every look and gesture tuned to a different pitch from anything I had ever known.”
This “region” upon which Ellen Kilshaw was cast, where Margaret Fuller lived, was not the Cambridge of Harvard College, of elegant mansions on Brattle Street’s “Tory Row” or gently sloping Mount Auburn. It could have been a world away. Margaret’s “region” was the upstart community at Cambridgeport, two miles east of Old Cambridge through marshes and pastureland, where squat frame houses like her own “comfortable” yet “very ugly” three-story house on Cherry Street clustered near the new West Bridge.Spanning the Charles River where it emptied into Boston Harbor, and leading directly to fashionable Beacon Hill, the West Bridge, when it was completed in 1793, had inspired Cambridgeport’s founders to drain riverside swamps, dredge canals, and construct wharves in hopes of luring trade ships away from Boston’s waterfront. But the financial failure, early in the new century, of the Middlesex Turnpike, an inland toll road intended to bring farm goods to market in Cambridgeport, followed by Jefferson’s devastating foreign trade embargo, then the War of 1812, turned the bustling district into a virtual ghost town of vacant house lots and unused warehouses during the years of Margaret’s childhood.
Ambitious Timothy Fuller, thirty-one, the fourth of ten children and the oldest of five brothers, bought the house at 71 Cherry Street for $6,000 in the summer of 1809, a few months after marrying twenty-year-old Margarett Crane. The price was high for a man who had paid his way through college and legal
In this third letter she begins to test Timothy’s strictures. Twice before she has written asking his permission to read an Italian thriller, Zeluco, and twice she has recommended for his own reading a novel—“Do not let the name novel make you think it is either trifling or silly,” she urges—called Hesitation: or, To Marry, or Not to Marry? In the pages of Hesitation she has encountered, along with the novel’s pair of indecisive lovers, the extraordinary comtesse de Pologne, a witty conversationalist, happily single, with the “power to disengage herself from the shackles of custom, without losing one attribute of modesty”: a woman whose personal magnetism draws both men and women to her circle.Does she hope Timothy will find the comtesse too and approve?
Sarah Margaret is writing fiction herself, “a new tale called The young satirist,” she tells her father, in the loose rolling hand she has acquired only recently, which will be recognizably hers from now on.Despite Timothy’s criticisms, she is beginning to feel how bright she is, even brilliant, a commanding presence in her mind’s eye, if not in daily life—the tall girl will soon reach five feet two inches and stop growing, becoming short, plump, and awkward as an adolescent. She too can play the critic, the provocateur, the “young satirist,” when she wishes. She is nine years old. Her mother, Margarett, just thirty, is newly pregnant with a fifth child. She closes her letter:
P S I do not like Sarah, call me Margaret alone, pray do!
2
Ellen Kilshaw
T HE FIRST LETTER SHE WROTE AND SIGNED “MARGARET,” even before she asked her father to “call me Margaret alone” (which he refused to do), was sent to Ellen Kilshaw, “first friend.”Ellen was older, a grown woman in her early twenties, “an English lady, who, by a singular chance, was cast upon this region for a few months,” Margaret would write years later, unconsciously adopting the language of the romantic novels she loved as a girl.And why not? She had fallen in love with Ellen Kilshaw: “Elegant and captivating, her every look and gesture tuned to a different pitch from anything I had ever known.”
This “region” upon which Ellen Kilshaw was cast, where Margaret Fuller lived, was not the Cambridge of Harvard College, of elegant mansions on Brattle Street’s “Tory Row” or gently sloping Mount Auburn. It could have been a world away. Margaret’s “region” was the upstart community at Cambridgeport, two miles east of Old Cambridge through marshes and pastureland, where squat frame houses like her own “comfortable” yet “very ugly” three-story house on Cherry Street clustered near the new West Bridge.Spanning the Charles River where it emptied into Boston Harbor, and leading directly to fashionable Beacon Hill, the West Bridge, when it was completed in 1793, had inspired Cambridgeport’s founders to drain riverside swamps, dredge canals, and construct wharves in hopes of luring trade ships away from Boston’s waterfront. But the financial failure, early in the new century, of the Middlesex Turnpike, an inland toll road intended to bring farm goods to market in Cambridgeport, followed by Jefferson’s devastating foreign trade embargo, then the War of 1812, turned the bustling district into a virtual ghost town of vacant house lots and unused warehouses during the years of Margaret’s childhood.
Ambitious Timothy Fuller, thirty-one, the fourth of ten children and the oldest of five brothers, bought the house at 71 Cherry Street for $6,000 in the summer of 1809, a few months after marrying twenty-year-old Margarett Crane. The price was high for a man who had paid his way through college and legal
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