Sarah Margaret Fuller was born May 23, 1810, in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, the first child of Timothy Fuller and Margaret Crane Fuller. She was named after her paternal grandmother and her mother; by the age of nine, however, she dropped “Sarah” and insisted on being called “Margaret”. The Margaret Fuller House, in which she was born, is still standing. Her father taught Fuller to read and write at the age of three and a half, shortly after the couple’s second daughter, Julia Adelaide, died at the age of fourteen months. He offered her an education as rigorous as any boy’s at the time and forbade her from reading the typical feminine fare of the time, such as etiquette books and sentimental novels. He incorporated Latin into his teaching shortly after the birth of the couple’s son, Eugene, in May 1815, and soon Margaret was translating simple passages from Virgil. Later in life Margaret blamed her father’s exacting love and his valuation of accuracy and precision for her childhood nightmares and sleepwalking. During the day, Margaret spent time with her mother, who taught her household chores and sewing. In 1817, her brother William Henry Fuller was born, and her father was elected as a representative in the United States Congress. For the next eight years, he spent four to six months a year in Washington, D.C. At the age of 10, Fuller wrote a cryptic note which her father saved: “On 23 May 1810, was born one foredoomed to sorrow and pain, and like others to have misfortunes.”

Fuller began her formal education at the Port School in Cambridgeport in 1819 before attending the Boston Lyceum for Young Ladies from 1821 to 1822. In 1824, she was sent to the School for Young Ladies in Groton, on the advice of aunts and uncles, though she resisted the idea at first. While she was there, Timothy Fuller, in order to help John Quincy Adams with his presidential campaign in 1824, did not run for re-election; he hoped Adams would return the favor with a governmental appointment. On June 17, 1825, Fuller attended the ceremony at which the American Revolutionary War hero Marquis de Lafayette laid the cornerstone of the Bunker Hill Monument 50 years after the battle. Fuller left the Groton school after two years and returned home at the age of 16. At home, she studied the classics and trained herself in several modern languages and read world literature. By this time, she realized she did not fit in with other young women her age. She wrote, “I have felt that I was not born to the common womanly lot.” Eliza Farrar, wife of Harvard professor John Farrar and author of The Young Lady’s Friend (1836), attempted to train her in feminine etiquette until the age of 20, though Farrar was never wholly successful.

Fuller was an avid reader. By the time she was in her 30s, she had earned a reputation as the best-read person, male or female, in New England. She used her knowledge to give private lessons based on the teaching style of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody. Fuller hoped to earn her living through journalism and translation; her first published work, a response to historian George Bancroft, appeared in November 1834 in the North American Review. When she was 23, her father’s law practice failed and he moved the family to a farm in Groton. On February 20, 1835, Frederic Henry Hedge and James Freeman Clarke asked her to contribute to each of their periodicals. Clarke helped her publish her first literary review in the Western Messenger in June: criticisms of recent biographies on George Crabbe and Hannah More. In the fall of that year, she suffered a terrible migraine with a fever that lasted nine days. Fuller continued to experience such headaches throughout her life. While she was still recovering, her father died of cholera on October 2, 1835. She was deeply affected by his death: “My father’s image follows me constantly”, she wrote. She vowed to step in as the head of the family and take care of her widowed mother and younger siblings. Her father had not left a will, and two of her uncles gained control of his property and finances, later assessed at $18,098.15, and the family had to rely on them for support. Humiliated by the way her uncles were treating the family, Fuller wrote that she regretted being “of the softer sex, and never more than now”.

Around this time, Fuller was hoping to prepare a biography of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, but felt that she could work on it only if she traveled to Europe. Her father’s death and her sudden responsibility for her family caused her to abandon this idea. In 1836, Fuller was given a job teaching at Bronson Alcott’s Temple School in Boston, where she remained for a year. She then accepted an invitation to teach under Hiram Fuller (no relation) at the Greene Street School in Providence, Rhode Island, in April 1837 with the unusually high salary of $1,000 per year. Her family sold the Groton farm and Fuller moved with them to Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts. On November 6, 1839, Fuller held the first of her “conversations”, discussions among local women who met in the Boston home of the Peabodys. Fuller intended to compensate for the lack of women’s education with discussions and debates focused on subjects including the fine arts, history, mythology, literature, and nature. Serving as the “nucleus of conversation”, Fuller also intended to answer the “great questions” facing women: “What were we born to do? How shall we do it? which so few ever propose to themselves ’till their best years are gone by”.  A number of significant figures in the women’s rights movement attended these gatherings, including Sophia Dana Ripley, Caroline Sturgis, and Maria White Lowell.

In October 1839, Ralph Waldo Emerson was seeking an editor for his transcendentalist journal The Dial. After several declined the position, he offered it to Fuller, referring to her as “my vivacious friend.” Emerson had met Fuller in Cambridge in 1835; of that meeting, he admitted “she made me laugh more than I liked.” The next summer, Fuller spent two weeks at Emerson’s home in Concord. Fuller accepted Emerson’s offer to edit The Dial on October 20, 1839, and began work in the first week of 1840. She edited the journal for its first two years from 1840 to 1842, though her promised annual salary of $200 was never paid. Because of her role, she was soon recognized as one of the most important figures of the transcendental movement and was invited to George Ripley’s Brook Farm, a communal experiment. Fuller never officially joined the community but was a frequent visitor, often spending New Year’s Eve there. In the summer of 1843, she traveled to Chicago, Milwaukee, Niagara Falls, and Buffalo, New York; while there, she interacted with several Native Americans, including members of the Ottawa and the Chippewa tribes. She reported her experiences in a book called Summer on the Lakes, which she completed writing on her 34th birthday in 1844. The critic Evert Augustus Duyckinck called it “the only genuine book, I can think of, this season.” Fuller used the library at Harvard College to do research on the Great Lakes region, and became the first woman allowed to use Harvard’s library.

Fuller’s “The Great Lawsuit” was written in serial form for The Dial. She originally intended to name the work The Great Lawsuit: Man ‘versus’ Men, Woman ‘versus’ Women; when it was expanded and published independently in 1845, it was titled Woman in the Nineteenth Century. After completing it, she wrote to a friend: “I had put a good deal of my true self in it, as if, I suppose I went away now, the measure of my footprint would be left on earth.” The work discussed the role that women played in American democracy and Fuller’s opinion on possibilities for improvement. It has since become one of the major documents in American feminism. It is considered the first of its kind in the United States.

Fuller left The Dial in 1844 in part because of ill health but also because of her disappointment with the publication’s dwindling subscription list. She moved to New York that autumn and joined Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune as literary critic, becoming the first full-time book reviewer in American journalism and, by 1846, the publication’s first female editor. Her first article, a review of a collection of essays by Emerson, appeared in the December 1, 1844, issue. At this time, the Tribune had some 50,000 subscribers and Fuller earned $500 a year for her work. In addition to American books, she reviewed foreign literature, concerts, lectures, and art exhibits. During her four years with the publication, she published more than 250 columns, most signed with a “*” as a byline. In these columns, Fuller discussed topics ranging from art and literature to political and social issues such as the plight of slaves and women’s rights. She also published poetry; her poems, styled after the work of Emerson, do not have the same intellectual vigor as her criticism.

Around this time, she was also involved in a scandal involving fellow literary critic Edgar Allan Poe, who had been carrying on a public flirtation with the married poet Frances Sargent Osgood. Another poet, Elizabeth F. Ellet, had become enamored of Poe and jealous of Osgood and suggested the relationship between Poe and Osgood was more than an innocent flirtation. Osgood then sent Fuller and Anne Lynch Botta to Poe’s cottage on her behalf to request that he return the personal letters she had sent him. Angered by their interference, Poe called them “Busy-bodies”. A public scandal erupted and continued until Osgood’s estranged husband Samuel Stillman Osgood stepped in and threatened to sue Ellet.

In 1846 the New York Tribune sent Fuller to Europe, specifically England and Italy, as its first female foreign correspondent. She traveled from Boston to Liverpool in August on the Cambria, a vessel that used both sail and steam to make the journey in ten days and sixteen hours. Over the next four years she provided the Tribune with thirty-seven reports. She interviewed many prominent writers including George Sand and Thomas Carlyle—whom she found disappointing because of his reactionary politics, among other things. George Sand had previously been an idol of hers, but Fuller was disappointed when Sand chose not to run for the French National Assembly, saying that women were not ready to vote or to hold political office. Fuller was also given a letter of introduction to Elizabeth Barrett by Cornelius Mathews, but never met her, because Barrett had just eloped with Robert Browning.

In England in the spring of 1846, she met Giuseppe Mazzini, who had been in exile there from Italy since 1837. Fuller also met the Italian revolutionary Giovanni Angelo Ossoli, a marquis who had been disinherited by his family because of his support for Mazzini.[ Fuller and Ossoli moved in together in Florence, Italy, likely before they were married, though whether they ever married is uncertain. Fuller was originally opposed to marrying him, in part because of the difference in their religions; she was Protestant and he was Roman Catholic. Emerson speculated that the couple was “married perhaps in Oct. Nov. or Dec” of 1847, though he did not explain his reasoning. Biographers have speculated that the couple married on April 4, 1848, to celebrate the anniversary of their first meeting. By the time the couple moved to Florence, they were referred to as husband and wife, though it is unclear if any formal ceremony took place. It seems certain that at the time their child was born, they were not married. By New Year’s Day 1848, she suspected that she was pregnant but kept it from Ossoli for several weeks. Their child, Angelo Eugene Philip Ossoli, was born in early September 1848 and nicknamed Angelino. The couple was very secretive about their relationship but, after Angelino suffered an unnamed illness, they became less so. Fuller informed her mother about Ossoli and Angelino in August 1849 in a letter that explained that she had kept silent so as not to upset her “but it has become necessary, on account of the child, for us to live publicly and permanently together.” Her mother’s response makes it clear that she was aware that the couple was not legally married. Even so, she was happy for her daughter, writing: “I send my first kiss with my fervent blessing to my grandson.”

The couple supported Giuseppe Mazzini’s revolution for the establishment of a Roman Republic in 1849. Ossoli fought in the struggle while Fuller volunteered at a supporting hospital. When the republicans they supported met defeat, they had to flee Italy and decided to move to the United States. She intended to use her experience to write a book about the history of the Roman Republic—a work she may have begun as early as 1847— and hoped to find an American publisher after a British one rejected it. She believed the work would be her most important, referring to it in a March 1849 letter to her brother Richard as, “something good which may survive my troubled existence.”

In the beginning of 1850, Fuller wrote to a friend: “It has long seemed that in the year 1850 I should stand on some important plateau in the ascent of life … I feel however no marked and important change as yet.” Also that year, Fuller wrote: “I am absurdly fearful and various omens have combined to give me a dark feeling … It seems to me that my future upon earth will soon close … I have a vague expectation of some crisis—I know not what”. A few days after writing this, Fuller, Ossoli, and their child began a five-week return voyage to the United States aboard the ship Elizabeth, an American merchant freighter carrying cargo that included mostly marble from Carrara. They set sail on May 17. At sea, the ship’s captain, Seth Hasty, died of smallpox. Angelino contracted the disease and recovered.

Possibly because of the inexperienced first mate, now serving as captain, the ship slammed into a sandbar less than 100 yards from Fire Island, New York, on July 19, 1850, around 3:30 a.m. Many of the other passengers and crew members abandoned ship. The first mate, Mr. Bangs, urged Fuller and Ossoli to try to save themselves and their child as he himself jumped overboard, later claiming he believed Fuller had wanted to be left behind to die. On the beach, people arrived with carts hoping to salvage any cargo washed ashore. None made any effort to rescue the crew or passengers of the Elizabeth, though they were only 50 yards from shore. Most of those aboard attempted to swim to shore, leaving Fuller and Ossoli and Angelino some of the last on the ship. Ossoli was thrown overboard by a massive wave and, after the wave had passed, a crewman who witnessed the event said Fuller could not be seen.

Henry David Thoreau traveled to New York, at the urging of Emerson, to search the shore but neither Fuller’s body nor that of her husband was ever recovered. Angelino’s had washed ashore. Few of their possessions were found other than some of the child’s clothes and a few letters. Fuller’s manuscript on the history of the Roman Republic was also lost. A memorial to Fuller was erected on the beach at Fire Island in 1901 through the efforts of Julia Ward Howe. A cenotaph to Fuller and Ossoli, under which Angelino is buried, is in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts.