Margaret Fuller is usually remembered—if—at all—because she is supposed to have told Thomas Carlyle in London, “I accept the universe.” The legend implies that she underwent a struggle to achieve this accommodation, and that the universe was to feel complimented. So posterity chuckles over Carlyle’s reputed comment, “By Gad, she’d better!” A more documented testimony to what many of her contemporaries sneered at as her “infinite me” is a remark she made at Emerson’s table: “I now know all the people worth knowing in America, and I find no intellect comparable to my own.” The heroine of such anecdotes is bound to seem to us a bit ludicrous, if not conceited, almost as much as she did to James Russell Lowell in the 1840’s. But the fact is that at Emerson’s table she was speaking the truth.

She was born in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, in 1810, to a father who, in a pattern of domesticity especially practiced in New England, dominated the family with dictatorial masculinity; and to a mild, sweet, self-effacing blank of a mother. Timothy Fuller was a lawyer; from 1817 to 1825 he was in Congress as a Jeffersonian—which made him something of an oddity in Boston society where Jefferson was still viewed with alarm. Timothy, the story goes, wanted a boy. and when Margaret came instead, he set himself to educate her as though she were a boy. Later he had sons, but he never so ferociously drilled them; in fact, they received most of their elementary education from Margaret. Defenders of Mr. Fuller argue that he did not torture Margaret unduly, that he imposed on her only the sort of training which any boy preparing tor college was then subjected to, and that the only irregular fact about his discipline was its being administered, in that day and place, to a girl.

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