Woman in the Nineteenth Century
New Edition
with Previously Unpublished Fuller Writings
and a Foreword by Horace Greeley
(Fuller, Margaret S.). Ossoli, Margaret Fuller. Woman in the Nineteenth Century, and Kindred Papers relating to the Sphere, Condition and Duties, of Woman. Edited by her brother, Arthur B. Fuller, with an introduction by Horace Greeley. Third Thousand. Boston / Cleveland / New York: John P. Jewett & Company / Jewett, Proctor & Worthington / Sheldon, Lamport & Co., 1855.
8vo.; occasional internal foxing, especially to title page, frontispiece, and tissue guard; small book store label to front endpaper; brown cloth, stamped in blind and gilt; rubbed; extremities gently frayed; closed tears to top joints. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
First edition of this reissue, enlarged with Horace Greeley’s preface, a hundred and fifty pages of Fuller’s “miscellanies” (including such pieces as “Wrongs and Duties of American Women,” essays on George Sand and Jenny Lind, “Household Nobleness,” “Woman’s Influence over the insane,” “Woman in Poverty,” and many others); and over fifty pages of “extracts from journals and letters.” BAL 6503. As her brother, Arthur Fuller, writes in his preface, this is for many of Wollstonecraft’s writing the first book publication, and for others, the first publication in any format. In his five-plus page introduction, in which he exalts her as embodying the ideals of domestic womanhood, and of Christianity, he explains his inclusion of more than the title work:
My free access to her private manuscripts has given to me many papers, relating to Woman, never intended for publication, which yet seem needful to this volume, in order to present a complete and harmonious view of her thoughts on this important theme….though, doubtless, she would have varied their expression and form before giving them to the press.
…Those who knew her personally feel that no words ever flowed from her pen equaling the eloquent utterances of her lips; yet her works, though not always a clear expression of her thoughts, are the evidences to which the world will look as proof of her mental greatness.
He closes by thanking Horace Greeley, of the New York Tribune which hosted so many of Fuller’s essays and articles, and describing him as “earnest in his desire and efforts for the diffusion of what Margaret has written.”
Greeley himself takes to task legislators, “already at the end of their scanty resources of logic,” in their inability to advance the cause of woman’s rights. Fuller, he calls “One of the earliest as well as ablest among American women, to demand for her sex equality before the law with her titular lord and master.”
Her writings on this subject have the force which springs from the ripening of profound reflection into assured conviction. She wrote as one who had observed, and who deeply felt what she deliberately uttered. Others have since spoken more fluently, more variously, with a greater affluence of illustration; but none, it is believed, more earnestly or more forcibly. It is due to her memory, as well as to the great and living cause of which she was so eminent and so fearless an advocate, that what she thought and said with regard to the position of her sex and its limitation, should be fully and fairly placed before the public. For several years past her principal essay on “Woman,” here given, has not been purchasable at any price, and has only with great difficulty been accessible to the general reader. To place it within the reach of those who need and require it, is the main impulse to the publication of this volume; but the accompanying essays and papers will be found equally worthy of thoughtful consideration.
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