"The year 1835 was a turning point in Fuller’s life: she made Emerson’s acquaintance, and her father died, leaving the family in financial straits. It fell to Margaret to help support her widowed mother and her siblings, so she abandoned plans to write a Goethe biography and to travel abroad, and accepted a teaching job at Bronson Alcott’s experimental school, in Boston. The otherworldly Alcott neglected to pay her, however, so in 1837 Fuller became a schoolmistress in Providence. Her wages, thanks to rich patrons, were the annual salary of a Harvard professor, a thousand dollars. But striving to elevate the children of philistines was intolerable, and whenever she could she stayed with Waldo, as Emerson was called, and his put-upon wife, Lidian, at their manor in Concord. Her first visit lasted two weeks, and Waldo initially found his house guest conceited and intrusive. Two more discordant personalities—Waldo’s cool, cerebral, and ironic; Margaret’s noisy, histrionic, and sincere—would be hard to imagine. But, as the days wore on, her caustic wit made him laugh, and her conversation, he decided, was “the most entertaining” in America. By the time they parted, Matteson writes, Emerson was “rhapsodic.” Fuller’s presence, he gushed, atypically, “is like being set in a large place. You stretch your limbs & dilate to your utmost size.” Fuller was a passionate pedagogue—just not in the classroom. Alcott, who had also failed at teaching, reinvented himself profitably as a “conversationalist.” A “conversation” was an informal paid talk, in an intimate venue—a parlor rather than a hall—whose raison d’être, Matteson writes, was to unite the participants in “sympathetic communion around a shared idea.” Inspired by Alcott’s model, Fuller decided that she would offer a series of such talks, by subscription, to an all-woman audience, with the goals of challenging her “conversers” intellectually and also of giving them “a place where they could state their doubts and difficulties with hope of gaining aid from the experience or aspirations of others.” Many women, Marshall notes, “signed on just to hear Margaret Fuller talk,” and were too intimidated to join the discussion, but the “Conversations” that Fuller hosted in Boston between 1839 and 1844 have been called, collectively, the first consciousness-raising group. By this time, Emerson had formed the intellectual society that came to be known as the Transcendental Club. The transcendence he espoused was a rejection of established religion in favor of a Romantic creed in which faith was “one thing with Science, with Beauty, and with Joy.” A soul liberated from blind obedience to Christian dogma would be free to follow its own dictates, and to seek a direct experience of divinity in art and nature. The transcendental “gospel” suffused Fuller’s “Conversations,” but in a more heretical form. She was encouraging women to become free agents not only in relation to a deity but in their relations with men."
A Left-Handed Woman: Essays" by Judith Thurman: https://a.co/0OG1kzg
