This single-volume selection of the letters of Margaret Fuller affords a unique opportunity for renewed acquaintance with a great American thinker of the Transcendentalist circle. The letters represent Fuller at all stages of her life and career, and show her engaged as literary critic, as translator and as champion of German literature and thought, as teacher, as travel writer, as literary editor, as journalist, as feminist, as revolutionary, as wife and mother. "My Heart Is a Large Kingdom," unlike previous collections, includes only letters transcribed from Fuller's manuscripts and does not reproduce correspondence known only from printed sources and copies in hands other than Fuller's.
Among the recipients of the letters in this generous selection are such literary and cultural figures as Bronson Alcott, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Arthur Hugh Clough, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Giuseppe Mazzini, Giovanni Angelo Ossoli (Fuller's husband), George Ripley, and Henry David Thoreau. Taken together, the letters serve as a chronicle of Fuller's lifetime and provide glimpses into her thoughts and feelings during the years of the "Conversations," Dial, and the revolution in Rome.
Reviews
"[T]his volume of selections from the larger oeuvre will make Fuller accessible to a larger number of readers. Specialists and general readers with an interest in 19th-century American culture alike owe a debt to Hudspeth for this welcome contribution to scholarship."--Publishers Weekly, January 2001
"[T]his selection of letters draws a comprehensive and balanced picture of the transcendentalist...Robert N. Hudspeth provides very brief and exceedingly helpful biographical sketches of the correspondents...This volume is an excellent alternative for academic and public libraries that were unable to afford the larger work."--Library Journal, February 2001
"In "My Heart is a Large Kingdom": Selected Letters of Margaret Fuller, Hudspeth has carved an elegant single volume of letters out of the complete and authoritative six that he has already edited. Hudspeth is a scholar's scholar: meticulous, unobtrusive, indefatigable. And in "My Heart is a Large Kingdom", he reveals that he also has a novelist's eye...Thanks to Hudspeth's scrupulous edition, it is easier to meet the private Fuller than ever before."--Caleb Crain, The New York Review of Books, 5/23/02
"A splendid selection of letters..."--Kirkus Reviews, January 2001
"Hudspeth's clever spirit rapping serves to remind us that Fuller remains obscure not only to most American citizens but also to many serious scholars of American literature...[O]nly scholarship as ambitious and accomplished as Hudspeth's can restore Fuller's place in what Emerson called an 'essential line of American history.'"--Christina Zwarg, Haverford College. The New England Quarterly, Vol. 75, No. 1, March 2002
"Hudspeth's selection of [Margaret Fuller's] letters is likely to win her new readers and admirers. . . . Had she survived, her public writings might have grown more like her private letters, capable of touching readers' emotions as well as their intellects. Perhaps the tragic story revealed in these letters will move Margaret Fuller beyond the textbooks at last."--Elaine Showalter, The Wilson Quarterly. Winter, 2001.
"Reading Fuller's Collected Letters - and one must, for there is no representative selection yet - one's pieties are constantly under seige: Her ruthless honesty makes our own definition of honesty...seem cheap and easy."--Christina Nehring, Los Angeles Times Book Review, April 15, 2001
"Hudspeth claims that the present volume accurately mirrors Fuller's 'interests, her friendships, her ideas, her longings, and her successes.' Accordingly, it becomes the best one-volume edition of Fuller's letters now available."--Choice, September 2001
"The Selected Letters provides in Fuller's own words her familial and erotic sympathies over her lifetime, her intellectual breadth and depth, her wide readings in multiple languages, and her social and cultural development well beyond a parochial New England initiation."—Carol Farley Kessler, NWSA Journal 15:2, Summer 2003
"Margaret Fuller's vivid letters are a fascinating contribution to American history and culture."--Elizabeth Hardwick
"Here Margaret Fuller speaks for herself and, thanks to Robert Hudspeth's judicious selection of her letters, she also reanimates the world she lived in and the world she hoped for."--Madeleine B. Stern, author of The Life of Margaret Fuller
“Drawn from Hudspeth's masterful six-volume edition of Fuller's letters, this selection is the definitive life-in-letters of one of America's first and most famous feminists and woman of letters, and is a mandatory
purchase for anyone interested in women of the nineteenth century.”--Joel Myerson, Carolina Distinguished Professor of American Literature, University of South Carolina
“Hudspeth's six-volume edition of Margaret Fuller's letters revitalized Fuller and spurred the current Fuller revival. Hours spent in the company of this remarkable woman in "My Heart is a Large Kingdom" will inform, provoke, and delight anyone interested in life and letters in nineteenth-century America.”--Joan von Mehren, author of Minerva and the Muse: A Life of Margaret Fuller
“What the journal was to Ralph Waldo Emerson the letter was to Margaret Fuller: a perfect medium for expressing the intimate, transcendent, and socially embedded life of the mind. Thanks to Robert Hudspeth's authoritative one-volume collection, readers now have an accessible and well-chosen sampling of these private performances by one of America's most fascinating intellectual personalities.”--Charles Capper, author of Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life
