Margaret Fuller Ossoli: A Biography

by Thomas Wentworth Higginson

“These nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century biographies reveal an unsuspected significance. Not only are a good many of them substantively valuable (and by no means entirely superseded), but they also evoke a sense of the period, an intimacy with the attitudes and assumptions of their times.”
— Professor Daniel Aaron

Originally published in 1884, Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s biography of Margaret Fuller Ossoli was the first full length study of the remarkable American journalist, critic, and women's rights advocate associated with the American transcendentalism movement.

The biography is uniquely informed and intimate due to Higginson’s personal connections with Ossoli and her family, and his privileged access to letters, diary entries, and reminiscences of Ossoli’s companions in the possession of Emerson and Alcott.

This edition benefits from an incisive introduction by praised scholar, Barbara Miller Solomon, who offers an insightful overview of the life of the woman who pioneered as a feminist, literary woman of letters, New York journalist, foreign correspondent, and social activist in the besieged Roman republic in 1848-49.

An American clergyman, army officer, and man of letters, Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823-1911) was heavily influenced by the Transcendentalism of Emerson and Fuller in his youth. He was ordained as a Unitarian minister in 1847 and became an ardent social reformer, an active member of the antislavery movement, and an early exponent of women’s rights. During the Civil War Higginson achieved notoriety as the colonel of the first black regiment in the Union Army. After the war he launched his literary career, became Emily Dickinson’s trusted friend and confidant, and wrote many respected works, including biographies of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Wendell Phillips.

332 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1884

About the author

American writer and soldier Higginson, Thomas Wentworth Storrow led the first black regiment in the Army of the Union from 1862 to 1864; he wrote many biographies, including volumes on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and John Greenleaf Whittier in 1902, and he edited the poetry of Emily Dickinson.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_...