Sarah Margaret Fuller, Marchesa D'Ossoli, was arguably the most famous American woman writer of her generation and--with the possible exception of Harriet Beecher Stowe--of the entire nineteenth century. Her career as a public intellectual is remarkable by any standards but particularly given the social strictures on women of her time. She was an important member of the Transcendentalist circle of Boston and Concord, in which she interacted with and influenced thinkers such as Frederic Henry Hedge, George Ripley, Theodore Parker, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, Bronson Alcott, and, most notably, Ralph Waldo Emerson, with whom Fuller developed an intense intellectual and emotional relationship that had a profound impact on both writers. She served as editor of the Transcendentalist journal The Dial for its initial two years and conducted a five-year series of Conversations for women that solidified her status as a leading intellectual figure in Boston and helped clarify her reformist views on women's social status.
