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Wall Street Journal

‘Bright Circle' and ‘Margaret Fuller': The Rise of the Transcendental Woman

Mary Moody Emerson, Ralph Waldo Emerson's aunt, was once asked whether she wanted tea, coffee or chocolate. She replied: 'All.' Would she, wondered her hostess, want them in separate cups? No, said Mary, 'all together.' A silly reply, a 'crotchet,' opines the writer Randall Fuller. But his deeply satisfying 'Bright Circle: Five Remarkable Women in the Age of Transcendentalism' is a tribute to a set of 19th-century women who made an art of contrarian thinking. They had strong reasons to do so, as the most brilliant of them, Margaret Fuller (no relation to the author, I believe), asserted, with stabbing irony: 'Ye cannot believe it, men; but the only reason why women ever assume what is more appropriate to you, is because you prevent them from finding out what is fit for themselves.' The five New England women featured in 'Bright Circle'—Mary Moody Emerson, Elizabeth Peabody, her sister Sophia Peabody, Lydia Jackson (later Emerson) and Margaret Fuller—did indeed want it 'all together,' and preferably all at once. At a time when women were mostly barred from college, they found other ways of extending their educations. As Mr. Fuller, a professor of American literature at the University of Kansas, informs us, Margaret Fuller grew up reading the classics in Italian, Spanish and French; Elizabeth Peabody knew as much about theology as a Harvard Divinity School student; while Sophia Peabody's determination to be a painter triumphed over her splitting headaches. 'When she closed her eyes at night,' writes Mr. Fuller, 'she saw splashes of color, shadows and light.' Social opprobrium didn't faze these women. Mary Moody Emerson wore shroudlike garments by day and slept on a bed shaped like a coffin—her nightly memento mori. The members of Mr. Fuller's quintet had a surefire way of alienating their male contemporaries. Composing a series of articles about the 'Hebrew Scriptures' for the Christian Examiner, Elizabeth Peabody reinterpreted Eve's reaching for the apple in paradise as a legitimate quest for knowledge. Andrews Norton, the Examiner's editor, ended the series. For the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Margaret Fuller simply was that 'dreary woman,' his response to a caustic review in which she had marveled that people would even bother to call Longfellow a plagiarist. In her view, it was painfully obvious that so much of his poetry was 'derived from the works of others.'