Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli First Edition in Two Volumes, 1852 Narrative of Women in Antebellum America.

Margaret Fuller

First Edition

Fuller Ossoli, Margaret et al. Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, 1852, represents the earliest extended biographical construction of one of nineteenth-century America’s most prominent feminist intellectuals and reformers. Published two years after Fuller’s death in a shipwreck off Fire Island alongside her husband and child, the work became the best-selling American biography of its era. The volumes intertwine Fuller’s autobiographical fragment with recollections by Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Freeman Clarke, and William Henry Channing, producing both tribute and editorial mediation. The memoir reveals tensions between admiration for Fuller’s transcendentalist intellect and discomfort with her public authority as a woman who advocated women’s rights and served as the first American female war correspondent.

Fuller Ossoli, Margaret et al. Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli. Boston: Phillips, Sampson, and Company, 1852. First edition. Two volumes.

Two volumes. Original publisher’s brown cloth binding with blind-embossed arabesque designs and gilt lettering to spines. Volume I opens with Fuller’s “Autobiography” and selections from letters and journals; Volume II includes Canning’s recollections and European correspondence. The editorial interventions, including expurgations and tonal adjustments, reflect Victorian efforts to reconcile Fuller’s intellectual radicalism with conventional ideals of womanhood.

The memoir stands as both celebration and containment, preserving Fuller’s incisive voice while revealing nineteenth-century anxieties surrounding female genius and public intellectual life. Light rubbing to cloth; softening at spine ends; minor foxing to endpapers and occasional leaves; gilt legible. Overall very good condition. A foundational feminist and transcendentalist first edition documenting both legacy and mediation.

Item #22043

Price: $4,500.00