Free Margaret Fuller by Megan Marshall Page A

comfortably large and conveniently located near the college on the newly established Professors’ Row (now Kirkland Street).
    Born to American parents but raised in France and England, Eliza Farrar had, like Margaret’s beloved Ellen Kilshaw, come to America as an adult after her father lost his fortune. She lived with family in New Bedford and looked for a husband—not to secure a “ mariage de convenance, ” as she referred to unions arranged for the sake of money, but to find the love of a suitable man who would overlook her lack of a dowry. Eliza would later write in her memoirs—which told of her acquaintance, in palmier days, with London’s literati—of the closed society she had known in England, where “love matches” were encouraged, but only among members of the same social set, and young people met and fell in love at weekend house parties, closely supervised by parents eager to preserve and augment the family fortune. Had she stayed in England, an unlucky young woman like Eliza, with no dowry to bring into a marriage, might well have been pressured to accept a husband below her in social status or a wealthy suitor for whom she felt nothing. Better to go to America, where her European refinement would show to good effect, where men were less “careful” in the financial matters bearing on marriage, and where social class was more fluid.
    Eliza Farrar, like Maria Francis, was already a published author when Margaret met her, but her first book, a children’s tale with a subtle anti-slavery message, had not won her fame—nor did Eliza seek it. Her chief interest was feminine propriety, although, in tune with the liberal social order of her adopted country, she espoused “an American freedom from purely conventional standards,” according to one of her neighbors on Professors’ Row, Charles Eliot Norton.Still, when she published a popular advice manual on dress and deportment, The Young Lady’s Friend, nearly a decade after meeting Margaret, she did so anonymously, as “A Lady,” in order to obtain not public recognition, but needed income, because her husband’s health had suddenly declined. If Eliza Farrar provided a less adventurous model of womanly achievement than Maria Francis—or their shared ideal, Germaine de Staël—Margaret learned more from her.
    Margaret was eighteen now and suddenly eager to acquire the poise and worldly sophistication—key sources of female power, as Margaret was coming to understand—that Eliza Farrar so obviously possessed. She was also attracted to the companionable marriage of the lady cosmopolite and the learned professor. Both were adept in what Eliza Farrar termed the “art” of conversation—with Eliza the superior talker. Despite the age difference, in this marriage husband and wife, unlike Timothy and Margarett Crane Fuller, were intellectual equals; in fact, the wife’s personality dominated. For several years, Margaret spent so much time in the Farrar household, where the childless couple held open house for Harvard students, some of whom were boarders, that she came to think of Eliza Farrar as her “elected” mother.
    Eliza, who was new to Cambridge and still reconciling herself to a permanent American residence, saw Margaret’s “extraordinary promise” as clearly as Ellen Kilshaw had, and made a project of her young neighbor. Her plan was to “mould her externally,” as a mutual acquaintance observed, “to make her less abrupt, less self-asserting, more comme il faut in ideas, manners, and even costume.”If Margarett Crane was stung by her daughter’s defection to another household, Timothy could not have minded the results. Eliza gave new orders to Margaret’s dressmaker and hairdresser and took Margaret on social calls to refine her manners. Shedding pounds along with her adolescence, Margaret would never again be faulted for ill-fitting clothes or frowsy hair. Her slouching posture, the result of kyphosis, an S-like curvature of