Margaret Fuller

1810 Margaret Fuller, Marchioness Ossoli (d. July 19, 1850), American journalist, critic, women's rights activist, revolutionist; the first female foreign correspondent and book review editor in the USA, and the first female journalist to work on the staff of a major American newspaper (Horace Greeley's New York Tribune).

In Europe she interviewed many prominent writers including George Sand and Thomas Carlyle, also meeting the Italian revolutionary Giovanni Ossoli by whom she had a son. In 1849, the Ossolis supported Giuseppe Mazzini's revolution for the establishment of a Roman Republic, Giovanni fighting in the struggle and Margaret doing voluntary hospital work.

Fuller was a friend of the Alcotts and Ralph Waldo Emerson and became part of the Concord transcendentalist circle with which they were associated. In 1850, when she disappeared with her husband and infant son in a shipwreck near Fire Island off the coast of New York, fellow transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau was one of those who searched for the victims.

See also our list of Early progressives in the Book of Days.

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