Finding Margaret Fuller

I recently joined the Enchanted Bookclub, an online book club devoted to classic female writers. I am enjoying catching up on a wide variety of presentations in the online library during my lunch breaks and having a community to talk about my passions for LM Montgomery and Louisa May Alcott. Another benefit of a book club is finding books that I may not have considered on my own. One of the most recent presentations was by  Allison Pataki on her most recent book Finding Margaret Fuller  I was aware of Pataki's work since my mother loved her book The Magnifient Lives of Marjorie Post. But her most recent book really peaked my interest.

Despite having a love for women's history, a fascination with transcendentalism and a love for American literature I've never heard the name Margaret Fuller before. Learning about the historical research that went into this novel, I eagerly obtained and read a copy. It had a lot of details that captured my interest: an extremely well read woman,  entanglements with Ralph Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne, a very young Louisa May Alcott, the birth of the fight for women's rights and eventually living as an expat in Italy.  The exploration of the characters made it impossible to put down! I was literally sobbing on my bus ride home as the story met its tragic ending.

I love listening to audiobooks when I am at my day job, so I listened to American Bloomsbury as a companion. When I heard Pataki's presentation I learned that American Bloomsbury was where she learned about Margaret Fuller and consquentially inspired her own fiction. American Bloomsbury was a really compelling biographical work of Thoreau, Louisa and Bronson Alcott, Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorn. The strong narrative style made it read more like a compelling novel. I never knew many of these stories before or how strongly influenced they all were by Margaret Fuller. Many of the dynamics in this non fiction piece were dramatized in Pataki's novel, making for an enchanted reading experience.

As a hungry reader, of course this is only wetting my appetite! It makes me want to revisit the authors I already love and dive into the words of Margaret Fuller!