Summer on the Lakes in 1843.
An Intimate Presentation
Corrected By Margaret Fuller
Fuller, S[arah]. M[argaret]. Summer on the Lakes in 1843. Boston and New York: Charles C. Little and James Brown; and Charles D. Francis and Company, 1844.
8vo.; occasional foxing; all edges stained; specially bound in three-quarter calf, marbled boards.
First edition; the earlier of two issues, without the seven etchings prepared by Fuller’s close friend Sarah Clarke. Fuller had accompanied Clarke and her husband, James, on their seasonal tour of the Great Lakes, the journey that resulted in this book. At some point during composition, it was decided that Clarke would contribute several complementary illustrations. However, as the book was advertised with no mention of the etchings, without which the first copies of the book were bound, this was likely a late inspiration; it resulted in a second, more expensive issue, with Clarke’s designs. Myerson A4.1.a. A rare presentation copy, specially bound, inscribed on the second blank—a publisher’s leaf—to two of Fuller’s most intimate friends, Samuel Ward and his wife, Anna Barker: Sam and Anna/ from S.M.F. With Sam Ward’s penciled ownership signature on the first blank, and with two autograph emendations by Fuller: In the dedicatory poem, “To a Friend,” she changed the final word in the first line from “plain” to “field”; and on page 196, line 11, she inserted “to” after “wo.” The placement of the inscription on a publisher’s leaf, rather than a binder’s, renders ambiguous the timing of this inscription. However, in so much as this was Fuller’s first mature and original publication, preceded only by translations from the German, it seems most likely that she had a small number of copies bound for presentation to her intimate circle. This is the first Fuller presentation we have handled and the only one we can trace in commerce in thirty years.
It is hard to overestimate the importance of Anna Barker and Samuel Ward to the emotional and, to a slightly lesser extent, intellectual development of Margaret Fuller. “Fuller had not only projected ambitions onto both—imagining an artistic or literary career for Ward, whom she nicknamed ‘Rafaello’ after the Italian painter, and casting Barker as an idealized Romantic heroine—but she was apparently in love with both as well,” James M. Albrecht writes. He continues,
She exchanged emotionally overwrought letters with Ward, in which they styled each other “Mother” and “Son,” and, as Fuller acknowledged several years later in her journal, she had been in love—at least in platonic terms—with Barker: “It is so true that a woman may be in love with a woman, and a man with a man. …It is regulated by the same law as that of love between persons of different sexes, only it is purely intellectual and spiritual, unprofaned by any mixture of lower instincts, …its law is the desire of the spirit to realize a whole which makes it seek in another being for what it finds not in itself. …I loved Anna for a time I think with as much passion as I was then strong enough to feel.” (“Margaret Fuller,” by James M. Albrecht, DLB Vol. 2, The Gale Group, 2000)
Fuller’s relationship with Barker was, for a time, idealistic enough to help to inspire Emerson’s famous essay on Friendship, though he used his own relationship with Fuller as the dominant model. John McAleer notes that Emerson had “grist” for the essay
not only from his friendship with Margaret, but from Margaret’s friends, who had constituted themselves as his instant coterie. These friends, who Margaret displayed, said Elizabeth Hoar, as “a necklace of diamonds about her neck,” included Samuel Ward, Caroline Sturgis, and Anna Barker. All three, like Margaret, were charged up with those emotional anticipations which, in that era, constituted a kind of prenuptial mating dance. (Ralph Waldo Emerson: Days of Encounter, by John McAleer, Boston: Little Brown, 1984, p. 328)
Fuller and Barker had met in the early thirties in C
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