SOURCE: Kolodny, Annette. “Margaret Fuller: Recovering Our Mother's Gardens.” In The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630-1860, pp. 112-30. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1984.

In the following essay, Kolodny contends Margaret Fuller's travel writings, particularly Summer on the Lakes, express the existence of an Edenic world that is beyond the reach of women because of their domestic captivity.

When Mary Austin Holley first visited Texas in the autumn of 1831, she brought rose slips from her daughter's garden in Kentucky to plant around her brother's home at Bolivar; some years later, she set out “the first strawberries in Texas.”¹ If the women who first contemplated making a home for themselves on the vast expanse of the American prairies thus felt the need to bring their gardens with them, a later generation claimed to discover on those same prairies a ready-made “garden...