Margaret Fuller and the British Reviewers

Abstract

N the middle of the last century the way to the approval of reviewers for the literary woman lay through conformity with the current ideals of what was expected of her sex. Political bias in reviewing was acknowledged, and moral prejudice was common. But, even if she was reasonably conventional in politics and morals, the woman of letters of the 1840's and 1850's might count on the cordiality of reviewers only if she did at least lip-service to nineteenth-century notions of correct domestic life. A spinster of independent mind could expect only a cold reception in the press. If that same spinster took a husband and acquired a family, thus serving in the noble capacity of wife and mother, she became a changed creature, and critical opinion was likely to undergo a corresponding change. Something very like this happened in the case of Margaret Fuller, now generally accepted as the most reliable critic produced in America prior to 1850. During 1840-1842 she had served as editor of the Dial and had subsequently conducted for twenty months a regular literary column in Horace Greeley's Tribune. During this time she had produced some excellent articles, far above the ordinary level of journalistic reviewing. Her measured praise of Longfellow and Lowell and her just criticism of Emerson approach much nearer the present estimates than other contemporary criticism, and her first judgments of Goethe, Carlyle, Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, Tennyson, Balzac, and George Sand are surprisingly in accord with present-day opinions. She had four books to her credit by 1846: a translation of Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe; Summer on the Lakes, an account of a trip to the West; Woman in the Nineteenth Century, a confession of faith in her sex; and Papers on Literature and Art, chiefly