To those readers for whom Margaret Fuller is only a footnote to the Brook Farm episode of the Transcendental movement, this collection of thirty-seven dispatches written for Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune presents an opportunity to view her as a developing personality, burning off heaps of silliness and taking on something like character—even splendor—as she finds herself caught up in the brief, calamitous life of the Roman Republic during the European uprisings of the late 1840s.

Sensing the possibilities of what a later age would call New Journalism (“If you could mix in them personal life still more,” she advised her predecessor at the Tribuneat his dispatches, “it would improve them”), Fuller spent much of late 1846 and early 1847 reporting from England and France—and quite without the distinction the editors of this volume attribute to her dispatches as a whole (“Their engaging contents, their vital, organic form, their supple, powerful prose . . .”). In fact, the British reports are oddly paced and suffer from a nails-on-the-blackboard tendency to follow up any clear observation of particulars with self-cherishing truisms. The sight of a sharp seventy-six-year-old Scotswoman makes Fuller tell readers back in New York that the old lady proves “the truth of my theory that we need never grow old.” Locating herself among those “who take an interest in the cause of human freedom,” Fuller can be counted on to become compulsively rhetorical about anything she’s glimpsed. “All but the very poor in England put out their