LETTER: Autograph letter signed, to Ralph Waldo Emerson and Autograph letter signed, to the Hawthornes.
Fuller, Margaret. Autograph letter signed to Ralph Waldo Emerson. Rome, January 21, 1849.
One leaf, ca. 8 x 5 inches; folded to make four pages, all sides covered in a hasty cramped hand. Addressed on the fourth page, “R. W. Emerson / Concord / Mass.”
A poignant letter. Fuller writes to Emerson, from whom she has had no word in six months’ time. Lonely, she writes from Rome:
Rome 21st Jan 1849
A day of universal & direct suffrage in a constitutional assembly in the old []tten hive of papal []ism.
A year & no letter from Eliza, six months & no letter from Waldo, I waited knowing I first had to write to Waldo & then to welcome him back, I waited knowing he had to get back & divide the crumbs of the foreign banquet among [] five hundred friends. Now I want two letters, one from Eliza, good household bread with a bunch of crickets beneath the plate. One from Waldo,
[page 2] the very great sentences into it from the lectures, if he likes, but he must not begin halfway down the page & scrawl the lines desperately wide apart. Begin at top of the page & think of me, how much she loves you & how many times we’ll read the letter & a good one will come.
I’m leading a lonely life here in Rome, which seems my Rome this winter. The sun shines every day. I feel well & my spirits have risen again to concert pitch. What the demons tried me so hard for last year I don’t [page 3] yet see, perhaps the morale will come lagging on yet, meanwhile I try to forget all but the present, a present superficial enough but that I do not decline. One doesn’t want deep calling unto deep always, the shallows with their gold & silver fishes may take their turn.
I have nothing particular to tell you which drops from my pen at once. As to persons, I have made acquaintance this past year mostly with thieves & prostitutes & must say my faith in the hopes of Lazarus are shattered. I did think back [] were more hopeful than good, but think now the chances are about equal.
Write dear Waldo [] & so will you
Margaret.
Fuller, Margaret. Autograph letter signed to “Sophia and Mr. Hawthorne.” Cambridge, February 16, 1844.
One leaf, ca. 15 x 10 inches; folded to make four pages, all sides covered in a sure, flowing, legible hand. Annotated at the top, perhaps by Sophia: “Letter from Margaret Fuller to Mr. & Mrs. Nathaniel Hawthorne.” Addressed to them by Fuller on the fourth page, “To Mr. & Mrs. Hawthorne / Concord / Mass.”
A spectacular unpublished letter from Margaret Fuller to the Hawthornes, with staggering content including revealing statements about her inner space, requests that Hawthorne embed her in his next story, a poem composed in honor of the coming birth of Una, and the declaration that she needs her own planet with her own set of gods and goddesses in which to function (which she was about to create in Woman in the Nineteenth Century where she takes great pains to replace the great White Patriarch Above with a variety of female embodiments of wisdom, divine and otherwise).
Truly a striking piece, a seminal reflection of her movement toward writing Woman in the 19th Century. The whole notion of the way she creates language herein and her need to carve out her own planet with her own gods and Zodiac is exactly what modern scholars see that she did in WNC.
Opinion is divided as to Fuller’s state of mind at the time of writing. One school of thought says that she was depressed by losing yet another suitor (William Clarke, the brother of James Freeman and Sarah Clarke). Another says that she was thrown by the simultaneous pregnancies of three women to whom (or, rather, to whose husbands) she was close: Anna Ward, Lidian Emerson, and Sophia Hawthorne. Our interpretation is as follows:
Paragraph #1: Her brother Richard conveys that the Hawthornes were expecting a letter in return for theirs, but how much can really be communicated in a letter? (She is about to unveil that, in fac
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