Margaret Fuller has been the target of more praise and more criticism for her work and her life than any other woman of the Transcendental period. She has been dismissed on one hand as a "bluestocking," and on the other as a coarse, conceited, immoral, and blasphemous woman. She has also been hailed as America's first female foreign correspondent, as the most brilliant woman of the age, and as the author of the first important feminist book in America. Her blessings were her formidable intellect and education; her curse was the fact that she was a woman. In the forty years of her life, perhaps her greatest contributions came from her intellectual influence on her peers and through the force of her personality upon the women with whom she had contact. That there were many Margaret Fullers indicates the rapid evolution of her life from prodigy to teacher...