Journalist and Reformer

Education. Margaret Fuller was a journalist and feminist whose spirited conversation and challenging literary criticism made her an important part of the Transcendentalist circle based in the Boston and Concord areas. Her father, Timothy Fuller, a lawyer and politician, insisted that his precocious daughter receive a classical education equivalent to a boy's and tutored her in Latin, Greek, history, mathematics, and grammar; Fuller was translating Virgil at the age of six. She later attended a female seminary to learn the social graces appropriate to a young lady, and though she mingled with Harvard students and acquired a reputation for being a sharp and intelligent conversationalist, she always regretted that as a woman she was denied a formal Harvard education.

Transcendentalist Club. When her father moved the family to a farm in Groton, Massachusetts, in 1831, she resented the move and missed her city...