Free Margaret Fuller by Megan Marshall

had created in The Rebels a heroine who, like herself, “possessed a large share of that freedom of thought, that boldness of investigation, which renders exalted talents a peculiarly dangerous gift.”Shunned by those who once feted her, Maria Francis put aside novel-writing and retreated from Boston to Watertown, just beyond Cambridge, to teach school, preferring that “honest independence” to mingling with “those who possess merely the accidental advantages of rank and fortune.”It was during this period of exile that Margaret and Maria became close friends.
    Margaret recognized Maria Francis as honest and forthright, “a natural person,—a most rare thing in this age of cant and pretension,” she wrote to Susan Prescott.Maria looked beyond Margaret’s “accidental advantages”—the imposing Dana mansion with its servants—to praise her young friend as “full of thought, raciness, originality.”As the two women contemplated their uncertain futures, feeling the dangerous inner heat of ambition, they undertook a comparative study of two European philosophers: the English empiricist John Locke and the French Romantic Germaine de Staël.
    Inevitably they favored the “brilliant” de Staël, who in Margaret’s words operated “on the grand scale, on liberalizing, regenerating principles.”They were captivated as much by the author’s role as intellectual diva in Revolutionary France as they were by her writing. De Staël—whose De l’Allemagne brought the fervid idealism of German Romantic philosophy to the rest of Europe, and whose Paris salon attracted political refugees and international luminaries alike—was the model both young women needed, even as her example must have seemed impossible to match in parochial New England of the 1820s.
    Looking back on her own brief burst of fame, Maria confessed that she had felt at times “like a butterfly under a gilded glass tumbler; I can do nothing but pant despairingly, or beat all the feathers off my wings, thumping against the glittering walls of limitations.”And at twenty-four, in retreat at Watertown, Maria had begun to worry that she’d end up as “a poor isolated spinster”—a more distant prospect for Margaret, but perhaps a troubling one after her several resounding failures in formal social settings.De Staël, who had inherited a fortune, had also managed to secure her social standing by marrying, though she lived apart from her husband and carried on love affairs without bothering to hide them.
    As their year of study drew to a close, Margaret watched Maria’s growing attachment to David Child, an idealistic Boston lawyer and newspaperman who would prove to be as improvident as he was in love with Maria Francis. When the couple married in October 1828, Child was out of work, so it was Maria who purchased the thirty-five pounds of cake they served at their wedding, drawing on her own new income as editor of the Juvenile Miscellany. Such “was the beginning of the married life of a woman of genius,” observed one of the guests.Lydia Maria Child would always be the financial mainstay of her marriage, and in less than a decade she had once again achieved fame, though this time not as a novelist. An outspoken abolitionist, she wrote An Appeal in Favor of That Class of People Called Africans, the most influential anti-slavery work before Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and, in a different vein, published The Frugal Housewife, one of the era’s most popular domestic advice manuals .
    Although Margaret and Maria remained friends, after her marriage the older woman became too busy for shared study, and her place in Margaret’s life was quickly filled by Eliza Farrar, who had married in 1828 as well, at age thirty-seven. Eliza’s husband was the Harvard mathematics and natural philosophy professor John Farrar, a fifty-two-year-old widower who installed his European-born bride in a Cambridge house not nearly as grand as the Fullers’ Dana mansion, but