ABSTRACT
In Cambridge, where Margaret Fuller was born in 1810, her father Timothy Fuller was known as a stubborn nonconformist. She kept up her studies in European literature and philosophy and translated Eckermann’s Conversations With Goethe for George Ripley’s new series of standard foreign works. About the time the Did was launched Ripley began to plan for a Utopian farm community, based on the Transcendental principle of plain living and high thinking. When the idea was broached to the group of Transcendentalists» Emerson was cool, Alcott thought the plan not severe enough, while Margaret, though sympathetic, remembered too well the dreary years on the Groton farm to chance a similar experience. The Boston to which Margaret returned was in the full career of a seething cultural upsurge. Margaret, culturally in full flower and with a mind that probed deeper and ranged farther than those of her contemporaries, was quick to assert her superior gifts.
