Finding Margaret Fuller by Allison Pataki

FINDING MARGARET FULLER by Allison Pataki (The Magnificent Lives of Marjorie Post and Beauty in the Broken Places) provides a fictional look at the life of a journalist and author who was famous during her lifetime (1810-1850) but is much less well known today. A contemporary and friend to writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and later Louisa May Alcott, Fuller crafted works such as Woman in the 19th Century. Fuller was even rumored to be an inspiration for Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne. Sadly, she met an untimely death in a shipping accident, but Pataki is a master at imaging and recounting events in Fuller’s life during her visits to Concord and while living in Boston and in Europe (there, Fuller was a foreign correspondent for Horace Greeley’s newspapers). Fuller’s feminist leanings are explored as well as her romantic trysts although modern readers may tend to cringe at Emerson’s seeming manipulation of her. FINDING MARGARET FULLER received starred reviews from Booklist and Publishers Weekly (“full of lush details about the life of an overlooked contributor to Transcendentalism and women’s rights”).