Megan Marshall > Quotes

“Margaret described an oppressive awareness that “I have no real hold on life,—no real, permanent connection with any soul.” She felt disembodied, like “a wandering Intelligence, driven from spot to spot.” Perhaps her fate was this: to live alone, to “learn all secrets, and fulfil a circle of knowledge,” but never to experience full communion with another being. The prospect “envelopes me as a cold atmosphere. I do not see how I shall go through this destiny. I can, if it is mine; but I do not feel that I can.”
― Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life

“Why do women love bad men? Margaret had asked the question herself, and answered it, in Woman in the Nineteenth Century. The belief that men have “stronger passions,” Margaret theorized, has been “inculcated” in women for centuries, and “the preference often shown by women for bad men arises . . . from a confused idea that they are bold and adventurous, acquainted with regions which women are forbidden to explore.”
― Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life

“And there was a fourth, “highest grade” of marriage, which included the best features of the others, “home sympathies” and “intellectual communion,” but added to these a “religious” dimension, “expressed as a pilgrimage towards a common shrine.” Margaret was careful to specify that by “religion” she meant “the thirst for truth and good, not the love of sect and dogma.” She also had in mind a particular style of devotion: a “reverent love,” a sense that one’s partner is the “only true” companion, the only other one “of all human beings” who can “understand and interpret . . . my inner and outer being.”
― Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life

“and fueled their mutual passion for the great Romantic texts—Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther and Novalis’s Hymns to the Night—which featured protagonists suffering in equal measure from lost loves and undirected ambition.”
― Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life

“Even more distasteful to him was the way he saw Margaret and other women conversing with each other as they gathered in his parlor: no sooner had the “stricken soul” confessed her woes than her companion “in return . . . disburdens into her ear the story of her misery, as deep & hopeless as her own.” Such an exchange was about as far from the ideal of friendship Waldo espoused as could be imagined, yet it was what Margaret sought from him—a connection through mutual understanding and sympathy—and that, at times, unwilling as he was to admit it, Waldo coveted for himself. For Margaret knew Waldo suffered too, though he presented a “cold pedantic self” to his parlor guests or argued for a Dial “measuring no hours but those of sunshine.” After age thirty, “a man wakes up sad every morning,” he had written in his journal, for no one else to read; but Margaret sensed his melancholy.”
― Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life

“Here in Rome, “men live for something else beside money and systems, the voice of noble sentiment is understood.” She had found in Italy “a sphere much more natural to me than what the old puritans or the modern bankers have made” in America, the now stagnant and degraded “new” world.”
― Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life

“Yet “Platonic affection” can only seem “sublimated and idealized to the more experienced.” It was a painful message for Margaret, an unmarried woman with no romantic prospects but with a deep need for connection with men. Yet there it was: there could be no turning back to the Platonic after a “thorough” experience of passion. Worse, her quest for Platonic affection, for connections or covenants that dwelled only in “the higher emotions,” marked her as “undeveloped”—a notion that Margaret, with her credo of self-expansion, could scarcely tolerate.”
― Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life

“Nathaniel Hawthorne, a friend of Margaret Fuller’s in Concord who followed her path to the Continent several years after her death, undertook an experiment in fictional form when he put aside writing stories in favor of longer narratives. He preferred to call his books “Romances,” not novels. “When a writer calls his work a Romance,” Hawthorne explained in his preface to The House of the Seven Gables, “he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume had he professed to be writing a Novel.” The novelist, in Hawthorne’s terms, aims to achieve “a very minute fidelity” to experience, whereas the author of a romance may “bring out or mellow the lights and deepen and enrich the shadows of the picture” while still maintaining strict allegiance to “the truth of the human heart.”
― Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life

“Margaret’s unfocused striving and rankling frustration over family obligations found answering chords in Goethe’s Romanticism. She began, and hoped to publish, a translation of his play Torquato Tasso, based on the life of an Italian Renaissance poet whose close confidante, an unmarried, intellectually gifted princess, complains of feeling stifled in her gilded cage. Margaret was captivated as well by his novel Elective Affinities, which put into fictional play Goethe’s view, borrowed from new science, that romantic attractions resulted from unalterable chemical “affinities” and should be obeyed regardless of marital ties.”
― Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life

“At thirty-six, Margaret believed her “mind and character” were already “too much formed” through “a liberal communion with the woful struggling crowd of fellow men.” She had instead worked for a living and reaped the “fruits of spiritual knowledge” these past ten years, seeking common cause with the laborer, the immigrant, the prostitute.”
― Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life

“She had made the observation several years before to a startled Waldo Emerson that “women are Slaves.” Married women in particular—and that meant most American women—were, in countless legal and emotional respects, the property of their husbands. Their liberation, however, was not to be found in a political movement, Margaret believed, but in reform of themselves as individuals,”
― Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life

“It was not just her unusual intellect and outsized personality that made Margaret seem to Waldo more manly than feminine, but also her anomalous position as a woman “of the bread-winning tribe” who earned her keep as a writer and public speaker, her rate of pay approaching his own. Margaret was Waldo’s female double, not his feminine muse, as Cary was now. Margaret felt this too; it was why she thought she would make a better man than he. And why she rarely looked at men “with common womanly eyes,” as she once wrote to George Davis, but rather with an eye to friendship—yet on her own more womanly terms. If Waldo wished she would befriend him as a brother, she willed him to befriend her as a sister. The disjunction perplexed and saddened them both.”
― Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life

“The city that Elizabeth looked out on that spring was in the midst of changes far greater than any since the Revolutionary era. During the 1820s, Boston transformed itself from a harbor dependent on foreign imports to one rich in exports from the rising inland mill towns of Lawrence and Lowell. Independent proprietors built new wharves and bridges. A toll road stretching west across swampland between Boston and Brookline was laid out atop an ambitious system of dykes that provided waterpower for scores of new mills. Known as the Mill Dam, this last project served as the underpinnings for future expansion into the Back Bay. In the next decades, Boston, once just a tight fist of land thrust into the Atlantic, would nearly double in landmass: its seven hills were razed and its riverbeds dredged for landfill to support a population swelling past 50,000.”
― Megan Marshall, The Peabody Sisters

“It mattered little to anyone outside the Transcendental coterie that Bronson Alcott had finally written something publishable—his “Orphic Sayings”—for the opening issue; or that an unemployed schoolteacher named Henry David Thoreau had his first piece published in its pages.”
― Megan Marshall, The Peabody Sisters

“but the “crisis is tremendous.”
― Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life

“am caught in such a net of ties here.” Again she almost revealed her secret: “if ever you know of my life here, I think you will only wonder at the constancy with which I have sustained myself.” But she would not. “Meanwhile, love me all you can; let me feel, that, amid the fearful agitations of the world, there are pure hands, with healthful, even pulse, stretched out toward me, if I claim their grasp.”
― Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life

“In no country is it more important to cultivate good manners, than in our own,” Eliza Farrar wrote, “where we acknowledge no distinctions but what are founded on character and manners.” America’s”
― Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life

“What she did not yet realize was that those boundaries were much looser for a child in the progressive circles of Salem and Boston, where a young girl who “poured out her whole heart” would be kindly received by adults eager to see proof of the innocent wisdom of childhood. As she grew older, Elizabeth would have to reckon with the fact that others began to find that same forthright manner disturbing in a young woman.”
― Megan Marshall, The Peabody Sisters

“But perhaps because Elizabeth was a woman and not, in his view, a direct competitor …”
― Megan Marshall, Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast

“hypocritical laws that made a woman pay for a man’s crime. Why should women “receive the punishment due to the vices of so large a portion of the rest”?”
― Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life

“Of course Margaret sympathized with this “small minority”—the “Transcendental party,” she called them—who were the first “since the Revolution” to experience a “violent reaction” against the established “mode of culture,” recognizing a half-century after the birth of American democracy that “political freedom does not necessarily produce liberality of mind, nor freedom in church institutions.” New England was finally “old enough,” Margaret understood, and “some there have leisure enough,” she wrote to William in Cincinnati, to look around and decry the “vulgarity of a commercial aristocracy,” to “quarrel with all that is, because it is not spiritual enough.”
― Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life

“she was losing her powers of clairvoyance. The girl had told Margaret to stop reading or she would never recover her health; Margaret had come to a similar conclusion on her own. “It is no longer in my power to write or study much,” she wrote to her mother. “I cannot bear it and do not attempt it.” The stress of “serving two masters” had become too much. She read and worked for her own purposes only “a little” each day now and attempted to reconcile herself to the possibility that “Heaven, I believe, had no will that I should accomplish any-thing great or beautiful.” Instead she took on a class of ten adults in German, six of them men. She needed the income.”
― Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life

“Margaret Fuller maintained that all human beings are capable of great accomplishment, that “genius” would be “common as light, if men trusted their higher selves.”
― Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life

“once a woman is “able to stand alone”—as certainly the Tribune’s star, healed by Dr. Leger, could boast—“then she will not make an imperfect man her god . . . Then, if she finds what she needs in Man embodied, she will know how to love, and be worthy of being loved.”
― Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life

“on April 28: “Rome is barricaded, the foe daily hourly expected.” These vivid entries, brief as they were, would anchor my narrative of Margaret’s Roman years.”
― Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life

“expected attack. On the morning of April 30, “Margherita Fuller” was named “Regolatrice” of the most ancient of Rome’s hospitals, the Fate Bene Fratelli on Tiber Island, and requested to report there by noon “if the alarm bell does not ring before.” She would be responsible for organizing the schedules of female nursing volunteers in order to staff the hospital “night and day,” as well as for attending at the bedsides of the wounded herself.”
― Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life

“material for her book. Despite the restrictive laws on women and children in the Papal States, Margaret had experienced more freedom of opportunity, both professionally and personally, in Rome than in New England or New York. And now she had a family, a child whose “little heart clings to mine” and a husband whose companionship, Margaret wrote to her sister, Ellen, is “an inestimable blessing.” Giovanni had remained loyal when she was “more sick, desponding and unreasonable in many ways than I ever was before,” and he had cheered and sustained her with “the sacred love, the love passing that of women.” “In him,” Margaret wrote to her mother, “I have found a home.”
― Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life

“Illness “controlled her without making her feel that her liberty was invaded,”
― Megan Marshall, The Peabody Sisters

“like the French, with their guillotines of the past century, their bloody “June Days” of last summer. Mazzini would negotiate with the French; he had already secured a temporary armistice. Besides, Garibaldi was needed to defend against King Ferdinand’s Neapolitan army, which crossed the border into the Papal States at Frascati as soon as the French withdrew.”
― Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life

“Although he had no dramatic successes to report as yet, Howe knew that he could win supporters by showing them a few blind children working together in a schoolroom to master the rudiments of spelling, mathematics, and even geography from specially crafted globes—unthinkable anywhere in the United States until now.”
― Megan Marshall, The Peabody Sisters