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Journalist, editor, critic, translator, and women’s rights advocate, Margaret Fuller was America’s first major female intellectual. Throughout much of the late-19th and 20th centuries, however, critics and scholars largely saw her as a minor figure in the transcendentalist movement with which she is associated, and her work was considered secondary to that of male figures like Emerson and Hawthorne. While her biography—including her marriage to an Italian noble and her dramatic death in a shipwreck—was often the focus, her skill as a writer was generally overlooked, and her intellectual development largely ignored. 

In the early 1980s, David M. Robinson was one of the first scholars to publish an article that focused on Fuller’s mind and art. Now Transcendent Woman completes and extends this early work. Outlining the development of her philosophy, which Robinson defines as a “purpose-oriented form of thinking, tailored to the commitment and assets of each individual,” he traces Fuller’s intellectual journey, first in relation to her family and the people around her in New England and later in her travels in the midwestern United States and, more importantly, through Europe and her residency in Italy. He focuses first and foremost on what Fuller was reading (Goethe was key), what she was thinking as revealed in her letters and journals, and what she was writing, including seminal works such as Summer on the Lakes and Woman in the Nineteenth Century as well as lesser-known essays, translations, and short stories. Drawing extensively on primary sources, Robinson charts Fuller’s development and achievement as an original thinker and fearless advocate of democracy.