The Puritans who first settled Massachusetts Bay have much to answer for. Only such godly forebears—and a heady dose of nineteenth-century German philosophy—can account for the peculiar combination of neurotic spiritual seeking and smug self- confidence that characterizes that branch of American Romanticism known as Transcendentalism. And, in the insular hothouse atmosphere that was Boston and its environs in the 1830s and 1840s, no one, not even the revered Sage of Concord, Ralph Waldo Emerson, so perfectly distilled the Transcendental ethos of intellect and solipsism as Margaret Fuller. To most Americans, Fuller is probably best remembered for her famous declaration “I accept the universe!,” usually in tandem with Thomas Carlyle’s equally famous rejoinder: “Perhaps on the whole it is the best thing she could do—it is very kind of Margaret Fuller!” But, to her contemporaries, Fuller was one of the most intelligent women in the United States and without a doubt its best read—her life a litany of firsts for women.

Born in 1810, the eldest child of a prospering Boston lawyer with political ambitions, Sarah Margaret Fuller—she shed the ‘Sarah’ at age nine—has a childhood worthy of John Stuart Mill. Under her father’s relentless tutelage, she learned to read at three, began Latin at five, and by nine she was simultaneously working her way through the Latin canon and the rudiments of Greek as well as the writings of Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Molière. Brash, blotchy, and overweight—the future Harvard professor Frederick Henry Hedge gently described her as