Margaret Fuller Read Online Free Page A

studies as a schoolteacher, but affordable now that he’d opened a law office in Boston and begun to make a name for himself in Republican party politics. Timothy expected to raise a large family (his father was also one of ten children), and he could walk to work in under an hour. He could not have managed so ample a house in Boston, and he chose to ignore the signs of Cambridgeport’s imminent decline. The birth of Sarah Margaret—named for his mother and his wife—on May 23, 1810, scarcely a year after his wedding, confirmed the rightness of his decision.
    The Fullers’ Cherry Street block was primarily residential, but across the road stood an “unsavory” soap factory, which, by the time Margaret was making her way through the Aeneid, seemed an ironic commentary on the commercial bubble that had so swiftly burst.There were other families hanging on to residential and commercial investments in Cambridgeport during the second decade of the new century whose daughters might have played more often with Margaret if she’d gone to school with them. Or perhaps not. A “child of masculine energy,”she preferred “violent bodily exercise”—boys’ games of chase and tag—to girls’ tamer pastimes on the few occasions when she pulled herself away from reading, now “a habit and a passion.”
    The neighborhood girls didn’t dislike her, Margaret recalled. They recognized her “hauteur,” she thought, as justified: “the girls supposed me really superior to themselves.”True or not, and likely it was true, Margaret’s reputation as an intellectual prodigy had spread quickly through Cambridgeport and beyond—before she could feel the sting of their rejection, she’d “given up” any wish for the girls’ friendship, “for they seemed rude, tiresome, and childish, as I did to them dull and strange.”Perhaps it was the neighbor girls she had in mind when, years later, she dismissed Cambridgeport as presenting a “ mesquin ”—mean, paltry—and “huddled look.”
    Within easy walking distance of Cherry Street stood a freshly built parish church, where Margaret caught her first glimpse of the visiting Ellen Kilshaw—“a new apparition foreign to that scene”—and a newly opened college preparatory school for boys, where girls were invited to study Latin and English composition as well, although Timothy had not yet permitted Margaret to leave his home school.Until Ellen Kilshaw was “cast upon” Cambridgeport, nearly all that Margaret Fuller liked about her neighborhood was the view as she walked away from it across the West Bridge over the gently winding Charles and into Boston—“the river, and the city glittering in sunset, and the undulating line all round, and the light smokes, seen in some weathers.”
    A glittering city shrouded in “light smokes”: a setting reminiscent of London in the popular novels Margaret was beginning to read and her father to discourage. But Ellen Kilshaw’s England was not London any more than Margaret’s “region” was Old Cambridge or Boston. Ellen had come from Liverpool, and she returned there after an eighteen-month American sojourn, with her last months spent in Cambridgeport—her project, as Margaret was fully aware, the search for a husband. Yet to Margaret’s way of thinking, Ellen brought with her the “atmosphere of European life,”the very stuff of her bookish fantasies: “I saw in her the storied castles, the fair stately parks and the wind laden with tones from the past, which I desired to know.”Ellen Kilshaw, with her “face most fair” and long hair of “graceful pliancy,” was a merging of heroines—a clever yet vulnerable ingénue whose father’s business reversals threatened her chances in the marriage market, and a refined English-style comtesse de Pologne.For Ellen enchanted not just Margaret, but also her parents. Three years after Ellen returned to England, in 1820, Timothy and Margarett would name their fifth child, their