Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft*

The dearth of new books just now gives us time to recur to less recent ones which we have hitherto noticed but slightly; and among these we choose the late edition of Margaret Fuller's Woman in the Nineteenth Century, because we think it has been unduly thrust into the background by less comprehensive and candid productions on the same subject. It is interesting to compare the essay of Margaret Fuller's published in its earliest form in 1843, with a work on the position of woman, written between sixty and seventy years ago – Mary Wollstonecraft's Rights of Woman. There are several points of resemblance, as well as of striking difference, between the two books. Both Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft have too much sagacity to fall into the sentimental exaggeration. Their ardent hopes of what women may become do not prevent them from seeing and painting women as they are.