LETTER: Autograph letter signed, to Mrs. Ellet.
To a Friend and Fellow Writer
Fuller, Margaret. Autograph letter signed, to Elizabeth Ellet; January 1, 1846; one leaf, ca. 8 x 5”; folded to make four pages; message written on two pages, address on one page; last page blank; with a strip of backing affixed to the crease on the first page; with small embossed flower in the first page, painted over with watercolors, and another small flower on the fourth page, embossed in a dark circle. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
Fuller sends a short but cheerful note to her friend, the poet, translator and historian Ellet, who she knew from a literary salon hosted by Anne Lynch (later Botta). It reads in full:
A very very bad cold bids me forgo the joys of the “large room” & all other proper to the day. May you fare better! I shall probably see Mr. Spring and if so will send for the discarded twins!
I send you some sweets as a sign of what will, I hope, accompany your steps in the coming year.
Affecy,
S.M.F.
Robert Hudspeth, the editor of the six-volume Letters of Margaret Fuller believes that the painted flower on the first page was not done by Fuller; perhaps the flower was already colored when Fuller bought the paper, or it was done by Ellet. He also suggests that the “discarded twins” are a pair of poems written by Ellet.
Ellet (1818-1877) published her first book, Poems, Translated and Original, when she was sixteen. Her biggest literary achievement was publishing the first history of women who were involved in the Revolutionary War, The Women of the American Revolution, published in three volumes between 1848 and 1850. Ellet married a chemist named William Henry Ellet, and the couple moved to South Carolina, where they lived for about ten years. During that time, Ellet published The Characters of Schiller (1839), an essay on the writer Friedrich Schiller and translations of several of his poems; Scenes in the Life of Joanna of Sicily (1840), a history of the lives of female nobility; Rambles About the Country (1840), about Ellet’s travels throughout the United States. She also published Domestic History of the American Revolution (1850), Nouvelettes of the Musicians (1851), Pioneer Women of the West (1852), The Practical Housekeeper (1857) and Women Artists in All Ages and Countries (1859), among other books and periodicals.
Ellet moved back to New York in 1845, and was part of the literary world of Fuller, Anne Lynch Botta, Edgar Allen Poe, Rufus Wilmot Griswold, and Frances Sargent Osgood.
The “Mr. Spring” who Fuller mentions is the abolitionist Quaker Marcus Spring (1810-1874), the creator of a utopian community in New Jersey called The Raritan Bay Union, and, later, the Eagleswood Military Academy. In 1846, Spring and his wife, Rebecca, traveled to Europe with Fuller when she acted as the Tribune’s foreign correspondent. The Springs were also friends with the writers Ralph Waldo Emerson andWilliam Lloyd Garrison, who supported the Springs’ Utopian ideals.
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