Fuller, SARAH MARGARET, MARCHIONESS OSSOLI

Fuller, SARAH MARGARET, MARCHIONESS OSSOLI, author, was born at Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, May 23, 1810. She received much of her early education from her father, Timothy Fuller, a hard-working lawyer and congressman, after whose death (1835), intestate and insolvent, she assisted her family by school and private teaching. In Boston the leaders of the transcendental movement were her intimate friends; here she edited The Dial, translated from the German, and wrote Summer on the Lakes (1843). In 1844 she published Woman in the Nineteenth Century, and in the same year she proceeded to New York, on the invitation of Horace Greeley, then editor of the Tribune, and contributed to that journal a series of miscellaneous articles, which afterwards appeared in a collected form as Papers on Literature and Art (1846). In 1846 she went to Europe, where she made the acquaintance of many eminent people; and in 1847, at Rome, she met the Marquis Ossoli, to whom she was married in December of that year. She entered with enthusiasm into the struggle for Italian independence. In 1849, during the siege of Rome, she took the charge of a hospital; and on the capture of the city by the French she and her husband, after a period of hiding in the Abruzzi, and a few months at Florence, sailed with their infant from Leghorn for America, May 17, 1850. The vessel was driven on the shore of Fire Island, near New York, by a violent gale in the early morning of July 16; the child's body was found on the beach, but nothing was ever seen afterwards of Margaret Fuller or her husband. Her Autobiography, with memoirs by Emerson, Clarke, and Channing, appeared in 1852 (new ed. 1884); there are also lives by Julia Ward Howe (1883) and T. W. Higginson (Boston, 1884, 'American Men of Letters' series).