Nature.
A Remarkable Three-Way Association:
Margaret Fuller’s Copy Of Emerson’s “Nature,”
A Gift From Her One-Time Best Friend, Anna Barker
[Fuller, Margaret]. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Nature. Boston: James Munroe and Company, 1836.
12mo.; pages lightly foxed; offset; green cloth; covers lightly rubbed, spine lightly chipped; a handsome copy of a fragile book. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
First edition, first state of Emerson’s landmark first book: Myerson A3.1a; BAL 5181. Margaret Fuller’s copy, inscribed to her by her one-time intimate Anna Barker: Margaret Fuller from her friend Anna.
Published a single day after the group destined to constitute the Transcendental Club held its first meeting, Nature can justly be labeled the “cornerstone” publication of the Transcendentalist movement, which in turn provided the intellectual backbone for the major American social reform movements of the 19th-century. In Nature, Emerson articulated his belief that Western views of the natural universe were in desperate need of reevaluation. He rejected the traditional discussion of God and his universe, sensing in these categorizations an ultimately self-defeating dualism. For Emerson, nature was inseparable from divine will, and he asserted that man needed to reestablish a relationship with nature that recognizes the natural order’s spiritual self-governance, a process which would permit man to reunite with his own spiritual source. In many senses Emerson’s arguments in this work foreshadow those of modern day environmentalists and, interestingly, of modern day eco-feminists like Susan Griffin who perceive a continuum between the attitudes toward the natural world and attitudes toward women in contemporary society.
Margaret Fuller, “author, teacher, literary critic, first American female foreign correspondent, transcendentalist, feminist, socialist, and revolutionary” (AR, p. 20) was born in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, in 1810. In the summer of 1836, Fuller, a formidable figure on the intellectual horizon but not yet a published author, was introduced to Emerson by their mutual friend Harriet Martineau. Both were rebounding from crises: Fuller, from the death of her father the previous year; Emerson, from his brother’s recent passing. They found in one another a distraction from their losses and intellectual peerage. Their passionate friendship deeply molded each, personally and philosophically: Fuller’s 1845 Woman in the 19th Century, a work of feminist theory based on the premise that women, like men, have immortal souls which must be allowed to flourish, picked up where Nature left off. And Emerson’s friendship with Fuller, coupled with Fuller’s friendship with Anna Barker, provided the models for the Emersonian ideals espoused in “Friendship” (1840), one of his most lauded essays.
Anna Barker entered Fuller’s life in the early 1830s when Fuller returned to Cambridge from Groton. She advised the socially unworldly Fuller on matters of taste, dress and fashion; she was a lifelong friend to Emerson; and she was intimately involved with the Transcendentalist Club. As previously noted, Emerson envisioned Barker’s friendship with Fuller and Fuller’s friendship with himself when writing this famous polemic:
That same summer [1840] Emerson also poured his energies into “Friendship,” an essay the grist for which he had now not only from his friendship with Margaret [Fuller], 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)
In his biography of Fuller, T.W. Higginson notes that when Nature
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