BOSTON, 1840 — Two dozen women gather upstairs in a musty bookstore near the Boston Common. Seated beside towering shelves of gold-leafed books, most wear bonnets and billowing dresses. All are quiet and demure, dutifully fulfilling the only roles America gives them — mother, sister, daughter, wife. All except one.

She begins with “great questions. . . To question, to define, to state and examine. . . What were we born to do? How shall we do it?” The women listen as Margaret Fuller holds forth. She seems to know everything, to have read everything. Shakespeare and Goethe, Carlyle and every classic. She is as comely as the rest, many note, yet at 30, she is unmarried and utterly unapologetic.

One woman falls asleep but the rest listen. And talk “without the usual limits of marriage and family.” And vow to come back to discuss Greek mythology. The “Conversations” have begun, sowing the seeds of the women’s movement and making Margaret Fuller a national treasure.

“How can you describe a Force?” a friend asked. “How can you write the life of Margaret?”

She was, she wrote, “my own priest, pupil, parent, child, husband, and wife.” She was also her own meteor. In a life cut short, she streaked across the American intellectual landscape. She was America’s first female editor and first full-time book critic. She was a war correspondent, a feminist scholar, a poet, and an inspiration to every woman who ever asked “is this all?”

“I shall always reign through the intellect, but the life! the life! O my God! shall that never be sweet?”

Born a few blocks from Harvard in 1810, Fuller grew up in the tangle of its intellect. Her father pushed his eldest daughter “to make me the heir of all he knew.” Taught to read at three, she began studying Latin at five and by age eight was translating Virgil.

Fuller attributed her nightmares and nervousness to her early education, but while her body rebelled, her mind bloomed. In her early twenties, she began publishing articles in local journals. She was soon considered the best-read person — male or female — in New England. And then she met Emerson.

A new mode of thought — transcendentalism — was rising to counter the worn out Puritanism of Old Boston.

— “Dare to live the life you have dreamed for yourself.” — Emerson

— “Rise carefree before the dawn and seek adventures.” — Thoreau

— “Very early I knew that the only objective in life was to grow.” — Fuller

In 1840, Emerson hired Fuller to edit the new transcendentalist journal, The Dial. As the journal’s mind and heart, Fuller wrote dozens of articles, changing many minds. And one article changed the lives of women.

“The Great Lawsuit: Man versus Men. Woman versus Women” appeared in 1843. Fuller argued for nothing less than full equality for women, full acceptance from men. "If you ask me what office women should fill, I reply—any. Let them be sea captains if you will. I do not doubt that there are women well fitted for such an office"

Fuller expanded the essay into her first book, Woman in the 19th Century. “We have waited here long in the dust,” she wrote. “We are tired and hungry; but the triumphal procession must appear at last.” Three years later, the procession began at the first women’s rights conference in Seneca Falls, New York. Susan B. Anthony called Fuller “the precursor of the Women's Rights agitation.”

But by 1848, Margaret Fuller was off on her greatest adventure. She had moved from The Dial to join the New York Herald, reviewing books but also condemning “the cancer of slavery” and lobbying for prison reform. In 1846, publisher Horace Greeley sent Fuller to London where she dispatched articles on her meetings with great minds. She also hobnobbed with Italians planning a revolution.

From London, she went to Paris and eventually to Rome where rebellion was raging. She sent back full reports, and one night in St. Peter’s Square, lost and alone, she met an Italian Marquis, Giuseppe Ossoli.

They never married; or did they? No one is sure, but Fuller bore a son, continued to write, and when the rebellion was crushed, made plans to return to America. "I am absurdly fearful and various omens have combined to give me a dark feeling,” she wrote in the spring of 1850. “It seems to me that my future upon earth will soon close.”

Three days later, registered as “the Marchese and Marchesa Ossoli,” the couple and their son boarded a three-masted schooner bound for New York.

In the early hours of July 19, 1850, the Elizabeth was approaching land when hurricane winds blew the ship onto a sand bar near Fire Island. Tons of Carrara marble below deck smashed through the hull. Masts splintered. The ship was slammed against the reef just offshore.

Passengers jumped into the water but Fuller, holding her two-year-old son, refused. She was last seen, friends wrote, “seated at the foot of the foremast, still clad in her white night-dress, with her hair fallen loose upon her shoulders.” Her son’s body washed ashore but Fuller’s was never recovered.

“It is not the length of life,” Emerson wrote, “but the depth.” And from her writing and from every Conversation that opened women’s minds, Margaret Fuller lived deeply. “What concerns me now is that my life be a beautiful, powerful, in a word, a complete life of its kind.”

The women’s movement she sparked continues. The freedom she lived daily remains her legacy, along with the words engraved on a monument in Cambridge’s Mount Auburn Cemetery.

By birth a child of New England
By adoption a citizen of Rome
By genius belonging to the world

MIND IN A MAN'S WORLD -- MARGARET FULLER