Events

Margaret Fuller--feminist, journalist, orator, and “the most famous woman in America”--is returning from Europe where she covered the Italian revolution for The New York Tribune. Despite her fame, this is not the gala return of a beloved American heroine. This is a furtive, impoverished return under a cloud of suspicion and controversy. When the ship founders in a hurricane off Long Island and Fuller and her small family drown, her friends back home send Henry David Thoreau to the wreck in hopes of recovering her last book manuscript. He comes back declaring himself empty-handed--but actually he has found a private and revealing document, a confession in letters, of a strong and beloved woman’s life like no other in the 19th century. Margot Livesey, author of The Flight of Gemma Hardy, said, “With beguiling intimacy and unparalleled eloquence, April Bernard recreates Margaret Fuller’s tumultuous last years. Her account of the secret life of this very public woman is both painfully specific to women’s lives at that time and yet wonderfully universal.  Fuller emerges from these pages in all her glorious complexity, as do the other transcendentalists who so reluctantly admitted her to their company. An absorbing and, finally, heartrending novel.”  This event will require the purchase of the book or a $5 Event Bucks ticket.