Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli. 2 vols.
“To Be With Her Was The Most Powerful Stimulus, Intellectual And Moral”
Sarah Clarke’s Annotated Set Of Fuller’s Memoirs
Fuller, Margaret, co-editor. Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli. Boston: Phillips, Sampson and Company, 1852.
2 vols., 8vo.; with ten leaves of manuscript tipped-in, one upside-down, at various places in Vol. I;I contemporary three-quarter vellum and marbled boards; stamped in gilt on spine; slight wear to covers and edges.
First edition: Myerson A7.1.a. From the library of American landscape painter Sarah Clarke, signed by her and by R.L. Clarke, to whom she likely willed the set, which was later divided. The Memoirs, published after Fuller died, were the result of a collaboration between three of her Transcendentalist friends—Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Henry Channing, and James Freeman Clarke (brother of Sarah)—who pieced together from letters and journals an account of her relationships, travels, and achievements. Following the contemporary biographical style, the collaborators omitted many names and expurgated potentially controversial material. Clarke, Fuller’s intimate, has unmasked several of these characters in her marginal notes. On her second trans-Atlantic voyage to Europe, Clarke annotated her copy of Volume I, providing names for which only “anonyma had been sketched in the original.” For example, during the years Fuller lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, she had a companion who is disguised in the text as “Lytton.” On page 87 Clarke identifies the early romantic association as George T. Davis (Manuscripts, Summer 1991, by Stern & Rostenberg, pp. 305-13).
The second volume contains ten pages of autograph notes by Don Giovanni Torlonia, a Roman aristocrat who, like Fuller, was active in the Italian struggle for independence. Don Giovanni borrowed both volumes from Sarah Clarke; in appreciation, he apparently returned them with a contemporary Italian binding, with pages of manuscript commentary tipped in at appropriate points in the text. Several of Clarke’s pencilled notations were slightly shaved in the rebinding.
Fuller’s long friendship with Clarke dated from their years together in Concord. In 1843, the pair traveled to Wisconsin territory to observe frontier settlements in the Mississippi basin. Fuller’s notes during the journey became the basis for her book Summer on the Lakes, to which Clarke contributed a number of drawings. Fuller’s death in an 1850 shipwreck, as she was returning to the United States from Italy with her husband and small child, devastated Clarke, who later wrote of her friend: “...as she was powerful, so she was tender; as she was exacting, she was generous... To be with her was the most powerful stimulus, intellectual and moral” (Stern & Rostenberg, p. 305).
Fuller’s political sympathies, strongly democratic, inclined Fuller to favor the popular Italian nationalist Giuseppi Mazzini. In the case of Mazzini, there is a telling contrast between the political views of Fuller and Don Giovanni Torlonia. Fuller, the American, may have seen in Mazzini a towering figure not unlike George Washington: this “great man,” she wrote, was “in mind, a great poetic statesman; in heart, a lover; in action, decisive and full of resource as Caesar” (pp. 266-7). On the other hand, the patrician perspective of Don Giovanni Torlonia could scarcely be more derisive: “Mazzini a statesman!! a great statesman!! ...He is the worst possible leader for a political party, and he has been a curse to the republicans, as well as a plague for Italy” (pp. 266-7).
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