Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life, The Private Years - Hardcover

Charles Capper's first volume of a projected two-volume life offers much detail to help us appreciate a remarkable mind....Scholars of this period should value Capper's clarity as well as his thoroughness; and feminists should rejoice that Margaret Fuller's history has been enlarged and deepened. (Historical Journal of Massachusetts)

Capper's study emerges as the authoritative account of Fuller's early life for its original and timely scholarship, rich historical texture, and balanced interpretations. Capper writes in an engaging style that gives vitality to the life of thought he chronicles. (Legacy)

This inherently feminist book results in the richest account we have yet of Fuller's formative years....Capper matches Fuller (and she was an astounding reader) in his study of the classical, republican, romantic and Transcentalist thought that influenced hers. Hence he is more able than any previous biographer to do justice to the nuances of her aesthetic commitments and to her religious, political and social thought. (The Nation)

Capper's superb biography is the first full-length modern rumination on Fuller's enduring riddles....Capper removes Fuller from the realm of the exemplary and restores her connections to the world around her―and to readers as well....Capper's mastery of the broad trans-Atlantic cerebral world in which Fuller lived is total, and he manages at once to convey the social pathos of her situation and the covert intellectual excitement....He is a master of intellectual genealogies and of the finely hewn debates and fierce contestation they spawned, and he conveys eloquently the living presence of the life of the mind. (Christine Stansell, The New Republic)

What a stunning book Charles Capper has written!...What Capper has done―simply, elegantly, and stirringly―is to take the tools of the biographer's craft and put them to exquisite use in fashioning a fascinating portrait of the first major woman intellectual in the United States. It is an absorbing story, fraught with the kind of rich detail and easy readability that might characterize a good novel. (Mary Kupiec Cayton, Journal of American History)

Margaret Fuller is recognized as one of the key social and literary figures in 19th century America - as prominent a woman in intellectual circles as there was in her period, which ended with her death in 1850. Capper is writing a full biography in two volumes that will reveal Fuller's personality and place her in the historical context of her time.

The Private Years deals with Fuller's childhood and education, her time as a schoolteacher, and her involvement with the Transcendentalists, particularly the story of her close and difficult relationship with the movement's leader, Ralph Waldo Emerson. It ends in 1840, when her public career began.