Margaret Fuller and Her Circles. Edited by Brigitte Bailey, Katheryn P. Viens, and Conrad Edick Wright. (Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2013. Pp. 318. Paper, $35.00.)Reviewed by April HaynesMargaret Fuller, nineteenth-century America's iconoclastic woman of genius, struggled for much of her life to carve out a sphere in which she might flourish. Unwilling to be contained within a generic woman's sphere, she embraced individuality, revolution, and, eventually, sexual passion. Her opus, Woman in Nineteenth Century (1845), helped to set tone for Seneca Falls convention of 1848. Beyond calling for woman's rights, Fuller mocked what she termed the attempts of physiologists to base any social demarcation on bodily sex. This critique continues to inspire gender scholars.Margaret Fuller and Her Circles originated with a 2010 Massachusetts Historical Society conference celebrating bicentennial. By marking the maturation of Fuller studies, it addresses a fairly specialized readership (2). Yet Brigitte Bailey invites general readers into world by introducing overlapping circles-spheres, conversations, and revolutions-that shaped her life and thought. The essays are grouped according to three historical themes: gender and sexuality, reform movements, and urban and transatlantic culture.Phyllis Cole traces feminist intellectual lineage from Mary Wollstonecraft, whose work she read while young, to Grimke sisters, whose Boston social circle overlapped with her own. Like them, Fuller claimed women's rights by on basis of moral equality. Cole compares manifesto with Wollstonecraft's vindication and Sarah Grimke's appeal, and considers it the most audacious confrontation with power (13). The others asked for support of powerful men, but Fuller regarded as not only deserving, but already possessing rights, which were of divine, rather than narrowly national, inheritance. This attitude of expectation, for Cole, constitutes Fuller's greatest gift to nascent True to volume's circular leitmotif, Cole notes that Sarah Grimke was in turn persuaded by Fuller. Late in life, Grimke declared that only can create true and exalted women (28-30).Lest readers mistake self-reliance for modem liberalism, Dorri Beam queries concept of at heart of feminism. Rather than self-possessive individualism, Transcendentalists envisioned an Oversoul connecting individuals to universe. Fuller expressed this capacious ecology of self through mesmerism. In volume's freshest and most intriguing gloss, Beam suggests that mesmerism afforded her a means of-in Judith Butler's phrase-undoing gender, for the soul was infinitely more diverse than a dimorphic model of sexed (60). Fuller considered womanhood an electrical spiritual essence, the feminine as a force tethered neither to body nor psyche (63).John Matteson addresses relationship of embodiment, sexuality, and virtue. In a society that relentlessly bound womanhood to corporeality, Fuller recognized that the body could not be theorized away. She famously insisted that those who would reform world must ... be unstained by error; they must be severe lawgivers to themselves. Matteson, among others, reads this line as an argument for sexual passionlessness, which he contrasts both with her remarkable blend of condemnation and compassion in writing about prostitutes and with her own subsequent liaison with Giovanni Ossoli (33).For Fuller, passionate error into which some fell was not exclusively sexual. …