A pioneer of nineteenth-century feminism, Margaret Fuller was a well-respected social and literary critic. She is best known as the founding editor of the Transcendentalist journal The Dial, and as the author of the feminist treatise Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845).

Biographical Information

Sarah Margaret Fuller was born May 23, 1810, in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts. She was the eldest of seven surviving children of Margaret Crane and Timothy Fuller, a Harvard graduate and attorney who served in the Massachusetts State Senate, the Massachusetts House of Representatives, and the United States House of Representatives. Fuller displayed superior intellectual skills at an early age and her father decided to personally oversee her education, which included rigorous study of classical languages and literature. She began studying Latin grammar at the age of five and progressed to Greek, French, Italian, and German. However, the demands of her father's strict educational program took its toll on...