"Nature is not yours until you are more hers"

28 June 2026: Still working my way through Laura Dassow Walls's biography of Thoreau. The section on Margaret Fuller's death provides moving details that I didn't know before (some of them disturbing). Walls concludes that section with an idea that really struck me: 

"Once again harrowed by tragedy, Thoreau turned not away from the things of nature, but towards them, voicing again his awe before the fundamental strangeness of materiality. Nature is not yours until you are more hers: that sympathy had been part of Fuller's legacy to him" (294).

Work Cited

Walls, Laura Dassow. Henry David Thoreau: A Life. The U of Chicago P, 2017.

"into another world..."

6 February 2025: When I wasn't conferencing with students today, I was proofing my book. Found myself moved all over again by this passage from Margaret Fuller's letters: “When I write it is into another world, not a better one, perhaps, but one with very dissimilar habits of thought to this where I am domesticated” (Letters 125). Fuller, I explain, wrote towards and for the world she imagined. It's inspiring.

It is a profound experience to re-read these pages in these dark and troubled day, not because of my writing (ha!), but because so many of these women continue to inspire me as they wrote and wrote and wrote through their own troubled times.

Work Cited

Fuller, Margaret. The Letters of Margaret Fuller. Edited by Robert N. Hudspeth, Cornell UP, 1983.

First WFH attempt of the semester...

22 August 2023: So far, despite some photographic evidence that might indicate otherwise, it's going okay. Working on my entry on Woman in the Nineteenth Century today. If I can get this one done this week and knock out the general entry on Fuller next week, I'll be so happy.

We did have to stop a few minutes ago for a feline nail-clipping--someone's little nails are so sharp and she uses them mercilessly when she's "playing" and trying to get you to play, too. She is pouting a bit now, which isn't a bad thing, work-wise. 

"... Fuller gracefully lets them go"

16 August 2023: "Depsite their powerful attraction to her...men and women came to find her too much for them. And however ardent her desire, Fuller gracefully lets them go. She reclaims them as friends. Fuller never loses self-respect in her frank pursuit of her objects, nor does she lose the esteem of those who refuse her. This is persuasive. And it helps me understand why I have never completely let her go" (Chevigny 266-267). 

Two posts in a row about scholarship and letting go, albeit in different ways. This passage from Chevigny's piece was a good one to read on the day I am starting to dive into Fuller for a couple of entries for the book. 

Also two posts in a row about scholarly passages that make me feel a bit teary. 

Work Cited

Chevigny, Bell Gale. “Forty Years with Margaret Fuller.” Nineteenth-Century Prose, vol. 42, no. 2, 2015, p. 237-272. EBSCOhost.

"We would have every arbitrary barrier thrown down..."

2 October 2022: Finished my entry on Transcendentalism today. I joked to Hannah earlier that it was a bear of an entry--but a little bear that I had neglected. But it's done so that's that. 

It took me awhile, but I figured out how use one of my favorite lines from Margaret Fuller's Woman in the Nineteenth Century: “We would have every arbitrary barrier thrown down. We would have every path laid open to Woman as freely as to Man" (20). There's something timeless about her rhetoric here--which is also kind of depressing because women (and other marginalized folks) keep having to make this demand. 

Work Cited

Fuller, Margaret. Woman in the Nineteenth-Century. Edited by Larry J. Reynolds, W.W. Norton and Company, 1998.