SOURCE: "'That Tidiness We Always Look for in Woman': Fuller's Summer on the Lakes and Romantic Aesthetics," in Studies in the American Renaissance, 1987, pp. 247-64.

In the following essay, Adams proposes that when assessed by Romantic literary aesthetics, Fuller's seemingly aimless travel narrative possesses an identifiable structure.

From its publication, critics have been disturbed by the apparent disunity, randomness, and padding of Margaret Fuller's Summer on the Lakes, in 1843. Even the favorable reviewers stressed its heterogeneous nature. In describing the book as "a remarkable assemblage of sketches," Edgar Allan Poe echoed James Freeman Clarke, who had earlier called it "a portfolio of sketches." Caleb Stetson was bothered by the inclusion in it of "things connected by no apparent link of association with the objects which seem to fill her eye and mind. . . . Tales also unexpectedly appear—such, for instance, as the German story of the 'Seeress of Prevorst'...