Finding Margaret Fuller, page 1
Finding Margaret Fuller is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical persons appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2024 by Allison Pataki Levy
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
Ballantine is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Pataki, Allison, author.
Title: Finding Margaret Fuller : a novel / Allison Pataki.
Description: New York : Ballantine Books, [2024]
Identifiers: LCCN 2023009186 (print) | LCCN 2023009187 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593600238 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593600245 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Fuller, Margaret, 1810-1850—Fiction. | Women journalists—United States—Fiction. | Feminists—United States—Fiction. | LCGFT: Biographical fiction. | Novels.
Classification: LCC PS3616.A8664 F56 2024 (print) | LCC PS3616.A8664 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23/eng/20230629
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023009186
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023009187
Ebook ISBN 9780593600245
randomhousebooks.com
Book design by Virginia Norey, adapted for ebook
Frontispiece art by Nora/stock.adobe.com
Butterfly art by BillionPhotos/stock.adobe.com
Cover design: Belina Huey
Cover photograph: Ildiko Neer/Trevillion Images
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Prologue
Part 1
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Part 2
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Part 3
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Part 4
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Part 5
Chapter Thirty-six
Chapter Thirty-seven
Chapter Thirty-eight
Chapter Thirty-nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-one
Chapter Forty-two
Chapter Forty-three
Chapter Forty-four
Chapter Forty-five
Chapter Forty-six
Chapter Forty-seven
Chapter Forty-eight
Chapter Forty-nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-one
Chapter Fifty-two
Chapter Fifty-three
Chapter Fifty-four
Chapter Fifty-five
Chapter Fifty-six
Epilogue
Author’s Note
Dedication
Acknowledgments
By Allison Pataki
About the Author
_146464160_
Humanity is divided into men, women, and Margaret Fuller.
—Edgar Allan Poe
How can you describe a Force? How can you write a life of Margaret?
—Excerpt of a letter from Sam Ward to Ralph Waldo Emerson
Prologue
Concord, Massachusetts
July 1850
Mr. Emerson looks through his study window to see Sophia and Nathaniel Hawthorne marching toward him. Up the Cambridge Turnpike they come, side by side, no doubt carrying some delicious morsel of gossip, as they are just now returning from a visit out at Melville’s.
Melville, the poor soul, Mr. Emerson thinks. The tortured man struggling to throw off the final strangling clutches of his great toil, his seafaring saga of the one-legged captain and the white whale he hunts. Melville needed Hawthorne’s companionship in order to finish; he said it outright. And so Hawthorne went, dutiful wife at his side. Hawthorne, who is still floating from his recent triumph with Hester Prynne and her scarlet letter.
Has Margaret seen it yet? Mr. Emerson wonders. Has she pieced it together? A woman who takes a lover and unashamedly bears his child. A lone woman brave enough to live in defiance of the Puritanical judgment and brimstone that try, in vain, to engulf her. A meeting of the lovers in the forest—surely Margaret will see herself when she encounters that scene. They all know about those magical afternoons of dappled light and pine-tinged breezes; of Margaret sitting in the sun, her chestnut hair loose and untamed.
Even Sophia knows. Long-suffering, saintly Sophia Hawthorne, who has seen so many women—and now men, given the tangle with Melville—fall in love with her husband. Attachments that, if she’s taking an honest accounting, are not sufficiently discouraged. But she’ll never leave her Nathaniel.
Here come the pair of them now, turning off the lane and up the front walk to Mr. Emerson’s home, Sophia clutching Hawthorne’s arm like she might tip over without his support. Therein lies much of the reason why Nathaniel picked her over all the rest: because she would fall without his steadying support. Hawthorne may woo women like Margaret Fuller, might crave their bright-eyed attention, yearn to kneel in thrall before their power. But for a wife and companion? He’s made a different choice.
Mr. Emerson’s eyes narrow. Sophia looks pale—paler than usual. And their pace—there’s something not quite right about that pace. Too hasty. No one rushes about like that on the gentle lanes of Concord. The Hawthornes are approaching with more than mere gossip from Melville.
Mr. Emerson turns from the window and crosses his study, making his way through the entry hall toward his front door. When he opens it, Hawthorne nearly barrels into him.
“Emerson,” the man pants. “Thank God you’re at home.” But Emerson is so often at home, it should not come as any real surprise. Sophia grips her husband’s arm.
Mr. Emerson eyes each of the Hawthornes in turn, his voice low as he replies, “Yes, hello. What is it?”
Sophia’s wisp of a voice is barely audible. “It’s Margaret.” She need not clarify; there is only one Margaret for him, for all of them.
“Yes? What of her?”
Hawthorne looks to his wife, a wordless communication, then back to his friend. “She’s…she’s gone.”
A tightness encircles Mr. Emerson’s throat, and he swallows against it. “Gone?” What can they mean, gone? “Her ship’s expected to dock in New York Harbor by the end of this month,” Mr. Emerson manages, but his tone is a bit strained.
Hawthorne offers only a quick shake of his head. That strangling sensation grips Mr. Emerson once more, and he raises a hand to the doorframe, bracing as he leans toward the Hawthornes. “What can you mean by this?”
“We’ve only just heard.” Sophia’s voice quivers. “Her ship…a storm. Off the coast of New York.”
Mr. Emerson’s mind, his incomparable mind that has earned him the title the Sage of Concord—the mind that has gathered them all together, here in Concord, to give America its glorious decade of original thoughts and letters—that very mind trips and falters now. He can barely keep the threads together as Hawthorne weaves a most terrible tapestry: An ill-fated Atlantic crossing. A captain lost at sea to smallpox, then a fierce summer storm. The final stretch of the journey from Italy to America. The shoreline of New York in sight, and yet, a fractured ship stuck on an unyielding sandbar. Close enough for the souls on board to hear the shouts of the onlookers lining the beach, and yet too far
Mr. Emerson feels as though his legs might give out. “Thoreau,” he says to the Hawthornes now, and he reads in their expressions that they do not understand. “Thoreau!” he roars, knowing he will rouse the entire street. But that’s his intention. Thoreau is just next door; surely he’ll hear. But is he next door? Or did he spend the night out on Walden Pond? Mr. Emerson can’t recall. “Thoreau!” he bellows once more.
A door opens, but it’s not Thoreau’s. It’s at the Alcotts’ home. Mr. Emerson groans. Bronson Alcott is just the wrong person for a moment such as this. But fortunately it’s not Bronson who appears at the threshold. It’s Louisa May. That’s fine, Louy can hear this. Louy ought to hear this.
Mercifully, Thoreau does emerge a moment later, trotting toward them. And now it’s a flurry of motion outside the Emerson home. Whereas a few breaths ago it was the Hawthornes delivering this terrible news, now Mr. Emerson brings his friend into this dreadful confidence. “Go now,” he tells Thoreau. “To New York. The beach called Fire Island. You must get to Margaret before anyone else. You must find her manuscript. Call on Greeley, you can stay with him. If Greeley is not in town, then Poe will help. Or Whitman, even Longfellow. Just get there. Get there as quickly as you can. You must get to the wreck. Find her. Find her book.”
If he’s too late to save her, if Mr. Emerson cannot claim the body of Margaret Fuller from its watery grave, then perhaps he can save her words. It’s the least he can do after all this time. Given the many debts he has yet to repay her—and now never will—he can make amends in this one way. He can tell her story. Because the fact that the world does not yet know it? Why, that is a tragedy nearly as grave as any shipwreck.
Chapter One
Concord, Massachusetts
Summer 1836
I know that Mr. Emerson is expecting me. It was he, after all, who invited me here. And yet, as I approach the front door of his grand white home, I feel a twinge of nerves. I pause, staring up at the house, an imposing structure set back from the Cambridge Turnpike, hemmed by a fence, the columned porticoes and rolling green lawns lending the place a simple, stately elegance. “Bush” is what Mr. Emerson called the estate in his letters, when he wrote to invite me from Cambridge out to the country for a week’s visit.
He’d read my newspaper tribute, Mr. Emerson explained, to his beloved brother Charles, so recently deceased of tuberculosis. He’d found that my words had touched his heart, providing some small balm to the pain of the untimely loss. I was a young writer of great promise, Mr. Emerson declared, his fine cursive filling the front and back of the page. As one of New England’s most established lecturers and perhaps its most prolific writer, he, Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson, took great pride in being able to support individuals like me. Even women, his words implied, though he had not stated that outright. But really, he hastened to add, the primary purpose of the visit was to provide companionship for his wife, Mrs. Lidian Emerson, now in the final months of her confinement before the expected arrival of their first child, and barely able to leave her bed.
“He’s collecting friends and thinkers to his side,” Eliza Peabody had told me, when she welcomed me into her Boston parlor for tea on the eve of my planned departure. Eliza, my friend of several years, and I had gravitated toward each other as two of the only young ladies in the Boston and Cambridge writing circles who shared the twin stains on our reputations of being unwed and wishing to work as published writers. We had an audacity to us that frightened many, an independence of spirit and circumstance that made us not a little bit threatening to some of the men who wrote about freedom and lectured about liberty. An independence that allowed me to accept an invitation such as this one from Mr. Emerson, to stay as his houseguest in the country.
Eliza was in a position to tell me what I might expect from a visit at Emerson’s estate, as she herself had made the very same three-hour journey by stagecoach from Boston to Concord on more than one occasion to accept a similar invitation—or was it a summons?—to the Emerson home.
“He knows of you, Margaret. Knows your reputation, evidently even knows some of your writing,” Eliza said, stirring a pinch of sugar into her tea as she held me with her intense, inquisitive gaze. I did my best to bite back the flattered smile that pulled on my lips. To think, my work had been read—and enjoyed—by a man such as Ralph Waldo Emerson. Certainly there were many who found my work and my passions unladylike, even unnatural. But not Mr. Emerson, it seemed.
Eliza went on: “Sophia and I were with the Emersons out at Bush in the spring.” While Eliza was a celebrated wit and lady of letters, her sister Sophia was known to excel at painting. “It promises to be interesting, my dear, to say the least. A chance to glimpse the great Sage of Concord at home.”
And now here I stand, clutching my cloth bag and gazing at the front door of Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s home. I glance down at my dress, a simple poplin of dove gray, a cream-colored kerchief tied modestly around my neck. I pat the skirt and then raise my gloved hands to make certain that my chestnut bun is tidy, the curls bobbing down the nape of my neck, giving myself one final prink before I knock.
I’m expecting a servant of some sort, perhaps a housekeeper or cook, but the man who greets me at the door is none other than Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson himself—I know his famous face. “Oh, yes, Mr. Emerson?” I shift my bag from one hand to the other, forcing a bright tone even as I feel my cheeks grow warm. “Hello.”
Mr. Emerson looks at me, one corner of his mouth tilting upward, the hint of a half smile, and then he extends a hand in greeting. “And this must be the famous Margaret Fuller of Cambridge at my doorstep?”
I take his outstretched hand and let out a puff of breath that sounds like a warble. I’m struck by the deep timbre of his voice, and by his informal manner—I hadn’t expected either. Already he’s caught me back on my heels, so I square my shoulders and summon a casual smile as I reply: “I don’t know about famous, but I am Margaret Fuller indeed.”
His smile grows from partial to full as his blue-gray eyes catch a lively glimmer. And then he sweeps his arm up, performing a slightly theatrical bow. “Welcome to Concord. Please, Miss Fuller, won’t you come inside?”
I accept his welcome and step past him, out of the warm summer afternoon and into the cool and airy quiet of the Emerson home. The foyer is bright and high ceilinged, with a gracious stairway and wooden banister before us and spacious rooms off to each side. I stand still as my host asks after my journey and I tell him it went smoothly. There is neither sight nor sound of any other person in the home, which lends the handsome place an almost temple-like tranquillity. I clutch my valise as Mr. Emerson ushers me across the front hall and into a room lined with books. His study, I suppose. A large mahogany desk occupies pride of place, topped with a tidy stack of papers and a pen tipped into a dish shaped like a bird. Beside it sits a half-filled inkwell. The room smells of books and firewood.
Mr. Emerson stands beside his desk. “What refreshment can I offer you, Miss Fuller, after your hours-long journey? Some tea? Coffee? Water? Ah, or we do have some nice cider, which our dear handyman has pressed for us.”
“Water would be fine,” I answer. As he pours us two cups from a pitcher on a nearby side table, I take the opportunity to subtly study his appearance. Ralph Waldo Emerson is tall and slender, dressed in a tidy suit with a cravat that hugs high and tight around his neck. I know from his reputation as a great speaker and writer that Mr. Emerson is a few years older than me, thirty-three to my twenty-six. Nevertheless, he has an undeniably youthful vitality about him; perhaps someone so filled with deep thoughts and ideas cannot help but overspill with an uncoiled sort of energy.
