Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Donna Dickenson

Critical Essay by Donna Dickenson

SOURCE:An introduction to Woman in the Nineteenth Century and Other Writings by Margaret Fuller, edited by Donna Dickenson, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1994, pp. vii-xxix.

In the following introduction to her edition of a collection of Fuller's writings, Dickenson surveys Fuller's life, thought, and works.

'My dear Sir,' I exclaimed, 'if you'd not been afraid
Of Margaret Fuller's success, you'd have stayed
Your hand in her case and more justly have rated her.'
Here he murmured morosely, 'My God, how I hated her!'
[Amy Lowell, 'A Critical Fable']

Margaret Fuller on Writing:

When I write, it is into another world, not a better one perhaps, but one with very dissimilar habits of thought to this where I am domesticated.

Margaret Fuller, in a letter of 1840.

Contemporary Feminists Mourn Fuller:

The first national women's rights convention was called for October 23-24, 1850, in Worcester, Massachusetts. In an account of this convention, the president, Paulina Wright Davis, wrote:

One...
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