Margaret had long believed a “noble career” awaited her, “if I can be unimpeded by cares.” Returning from the West, she felt more capable of realizing that destiny—as if “the language of nature” had educated Margaret to become “strong, resolute, and able.” Experiencing such powerful reactions to other people’s suffering, as she had years earlier when visiting the cottages of her sick and elderly neighbors in Groton, fueled a passion now to “take share in more public life,” to write on large questions for a broad audience.
Her journey back to New England was a different sort of “phantasmagoria,” this time of familiar scenes and faces. Traveling alone again, she chose a route that took her down the Hudson River to New York City, retracing in early autumn the voyage on which she had first met Sam Ward in summer nearly a decade before. This time William Channing, who’d settled with his young family in Manhattan rather than Massachusetts, greeted her on the dock, guiding her to the City Hotel and, the next morning, to Sunday services at his newly formed Society of Christian Union church—a haven for communitarian thinkers—where, to her surprise, Bronson Alcott and an English friend, Charles Lane, were in attendance, seeking support for Fruitlands, their planned utopian settlement on a farm fifteen miles west of Concord. Henry Thoreau was there too, in a back pew. The young Concordian Margaret had come to think of as “the man to be with in the woods” had taken a job as tutor for the children of Waldo’s lawyer brother William on Staten Island.
Margaret stayed long enough among what she had once referred to as “those dim New Yorkers” to meet a few luminaries, including Horace Greeley, the founding editor, in 1841, of the New-York Tribune, who had excerpted long portions of “The Great Lawsuit” for his newspaper, and Henry James Sr., a new acquaintance of Waldo’s who was soon to leave the city for Europe with his wife and young sons, William and Harry. An old hand at travel now, Margaret sympathized with the elder Henry James’s decision: “the student (of books) should see Europe; on its own theatre he better understands the life whence the literature sprang.”
Margaret wrote to Henry James Sr. from the “poor shady little nook” of New England, where, after a stretch of “splendid October days,” she was feeling at home again. Indeed, her quarters on Ellery Street in Cambridge, with a view of the Charles River similar to the one she’d enjoyed from the upper floors of the Dana mansion as a girl, felt to her surprise “as good a place as any in the world.” The chief reason: Margaret had talked her way into desk privileges at Harvard’s library in palatial Gore Hall, then the most extensive collection of books in the nation, yet never before opened to a woman for anything more than an impromptu tour. Each morning Margaret could walk a short way down the road from the little house she shared with her mother to the turreted stone edifice and “have sweets at will,” like the Harvard men she had once envied. Over the course of the next several months, she completed the research for Summer on the Lakes, in 1843, not caring that she was an object of curiosity to young collegians who “had never before looked upon a woman reading within those sacred precincts.”
Announcing the plan of her travelogue to Waldo, Margaret wrote apologetically that her new project meant there would be “no lives of Goethe, no romances”—the biography and novels she had once dreamed of writing—only this “little book,” which might amount at best to “a kind of letter box,” drawn from her correspondence during the months away. But as she worked on the manuscript, which grew to include not just revised excerpts from her journal-letters, but poetry, passages of “romance,” and invented dialogues, Margaret began to develop a theory that “in addressing the public at large, it is not best to express a thought in as few words as possible.” Instead, she argued, “there is much classic authority for diffuseness.” She had not written her book on Goethe, but she could follow the example of his entertainingly discursive Italian Journey, as well as Lydia Maria Child’s more recent Letters from New-York, which combined historical anecdote with contemporary observation, and Harriet Martineau’s politically charged commentary on her tour of the New World, Society in America.
While Margaret would not defend the improvisational form of Summer on the Lakes to Waldo Emerson—in fact, she continued to worry up until publication that “my mind does not act” on the disparate portions of the book “enough to fuse them” —she sparred with him over his editorship of The Dial, which was foundering under his leadership. She objected that “you would have every thing in it good according to your taste,” which she considered “far too narrow in its range.” As editor, and now as writer, Margaret took the opposite tack: “I wish my tastes and sympathies still more expansive than they are, instead of more severe.” Literally covering new ground with Summer on the Lakes, she could revel in that expansive sensibility.
Margaret consulted Waldo about a publisher for the book and relied on him to act as her representative—the “friend at once efficient and sympathizing” she had lacked only a few years earlier, as she’d complained to James Clarke—but she followed Horace Greeley’s advice instead. Rather than publish with the Bostonian James Munroe, who had brought out all of Waldo’s books so far, she accepted royalties of ten percent from Little and Brown, a new Boston firm that would share the title page with Charles S. Francis and Company of New York, giving the book a foothold beyond New England.
Henry Thoreau had recommended self-publishing, with production costs to be covered by subscription from The Dial circle; Margaret would take all the profit once expenses were repaid. But she sensed the folly of such a venture in light of the group’s failure to make money on The Dial. Still, she looked toward publication warily, having grown accustomed to confronting “the Public at large” from The Dial’s pages, “amid a group of ‘liberally educated and respectable gentlemen’”—never before on her own. When she signed her Dial articles at all, Margaret still used the relatively anonymous byline “F.” For her book she used “S. M. Fuller,” stopping short of announcing her feminine first names to those who didn’t recognize her initials. But could she count on any who were not already her friends to buy and read the book?
Little and Brown typeset her copy in installments, so that Margaret was proofreading galleys while she continued to compose, writing the final lines on her thirty-fourth birthday, five years after a similarly exhausting effort brought her Eckermann translation to completion. The finished book appeared two weeks later, just a year after she’d set out on the journey west. A second, illustrated edition, with seven of Sarah Clarke’s sketches transferred to etching plates, followed soon after. Despite her anxieties, Margaret hoped publication would usher in “an important era in my life,” and she was not disappointed.
Summer on the Lakes sold better than any single issue of The Dial—seven hundred copies of the more expensive illustrated edition were gone within the year —and better than Waldo’s first book, Nature. But equally important to Margaret was the book’s reception by readers and reviewers. The New York City imprint persuaded the mainstream press that Margaret had distanced herself from that “literary sect” the critics so loved to despise, the Transcendentalists with their distasteful “excellencies and oddities,” as the reviewer for Graham’s Magazine in Philadelphia wrote. Edgar Allan Poe, whose reviews carried substantial weight, admired the book’s “graphicality” —its vivid pictures of the West; Horace Greeley announced in his New-York Tribune that Summer on the Lakes provided proof that Margaret was “one of the most original as well as intellectual of American Women.” The New York editor and critic Evert Duyckinck’s admiration ran even deeper: he considered Margaret’s to be “the only genuine American book . . . published this season.” While her old friend Maria Child was put off by the book’s conglomerate form, advising Margaret that “your house is too full; there is too much furniture in your rooms,” Waldo Emerson found virtue in what Child identified as a root problem—Margaret’s “higher education than popular writers usually have.” Waldo wrote to Cary Sturgis that the book had exceeded his expectations and �
��has a fine superior tone which is the native voice of that extraordinary Margaret.”
In Boston, Margaret was predictably faulted by the Christian Examiner for her “reflective tendency.” A former ally, Orestes Brownson, whose Transcendentalism had recently transmuted into a stringent Catholicism, offered the most severe critique, labeling Margaret in his Quarterly Review “a heathen priestess, though of what god or goddess we will not pretend to say.” Before addressing the merits of the book itself, Brownson attacked Margaret ad hominem as “deficient in a pure, correct taste . . . and especially in that tidiness we always look for in woman.” Still, Brownson allowed that Summer on the Lakes was “marked by flashes of a rare genius, by uncommon and versatile powers, by sentiments at times almost devout.” If she was damned by one erratic former Transcendentalist and dismissed by the Unitarian establishment at home, Margaret had been praised in magazines and newspapers from New Orleans to New York City and approved by her closest friends. The book was not in the end “assailed” by reviewers, as she had feared, but instead, she noted gleefully, it “seems to be selling very well” and was “much read.”
In one short season, the town of Concord had become a “world of infants.” Ellen and Ellery Channing’s first child, a girl named Margaret and nicknamed “Greta,” was born the same day that Margaret finished writing Summer on the Lakes—her birthday. Earlier that spring, Sophia Hawthorne had carried her first child to term after a disheartening miscarriage the year before. The Hawthornes’ little girl was named Una, after one of Edmund Spenser’s chaste heroines, the representative of pure faith in his allegorical verse epic The Faerie Queene. In June of 1844, Sophia generously took a second baby to breast, nourishing the hungry Greta when Ellen’s milk failed. In July, Lidian Emerson gave birth to a second son, Edward, the day before Margaret arrived for her summer visit; Margaret stayed first with the Hawthornes, taking turns with Sophia at minding little Una, and then stole a solitary week in the Channings’ empty house. In an early sign that the couple’s marital strains would not diminish, Ellen had taken Greta to stay with Margarett Crane in Cambridge while Ellery set out with Henry Thoreau to the Catskills for vagabonding.
Although Margaret had written to Waldo the previous winter that she hoped his next child would be a son, to help ease the loss of his firstborn—“men do not feel themselves represented to the next generation by daughters,” she had learned from her own father—she decided that on the whole it was fortunate that her sister’s baby was a girl. “Girls are to have a better chance now I think,” she prophesied. But that better chance still lay in the future. Margaret was as uncertain as ever of the merits of being an adult female in her own time and place, which still meant leading a primarily private life. While she never wished herself a man—“I love best to be a woman”—Margaret felt that “womanhood is at present too straitly-bounded to give me scope.” She resented the need to choose to be “either private or public,” a choice men did not face, even with the advent of parenthood.
When she considered the lives of her sister, Ellen, of Sophia Hawthorne and Lidian Emerson, Margaret felt at times that she might manage to “live truly as a woman; at others, I should stifle.” The bare truth was that “I have no child,” she wrote in her journal, though “the woman in me has so craved this experience that it has seemed the want of it must paralyze me.” That same paralyzing “want” was also, she understood, “a great privilege . . . [to] have no way tied my hands or feet.” These young and not-so-young mothers, she could see, “feel withdrawn by sweet duties from Reality.” Yet while a public life might provide wider “scope,” the prospect was daunting, inducing “palsy” when Margaret imagined herself “play[ing] the artist,” like her idols Madame de Staël and George Sand. These were European women of means; how could she manage such a life in New England?
In February 1844, before the publication of Summer on the Lakes, before the births of Una, Greta, and Edward, Margaret had considered renting a house in Concord across the street from Waldo’s. The rent was just sixty dollars a year, and Richard could join Margaret and her mother there, once he graduated from Harvard in August. The Conversations, which had provided Margaret’s chief support while living in or near Boston, were dwindling in popularity; perhaps the time had come to withdraw to an inexpensive house in the country and attempt to “play the artist,” to write more books. In March she also faced the certainty that William Clarke, for whom she’d entertained an infatuation the summer before, simply had no interest in forming a lasting connection, either as “companion” or “to be loved.” William had arrived in Boston to visit his family and avoided Margaret at every turn. Worse, like other men before him, he was smitten with Cary Sturgis, who did not return the westerner’s interest. Margaret hated the reminder of her relative plainness—that “I am such a shabby plant, of such coarse tissue.” With spring in the air, it was painful “not to be beautiful, when all around is so.” Margaret was momentarily undone by these “keen pangs” of “disappointment” and resolved to “wean myself” from “close habits of personal relations.”
The Conversations had allowed Margaret to tread a fine line between public and private life, offering her the means to develop and express provocative ideas within the relative safety of a domestic parlor—or Elizabeth Peabody’s communal bookroom—just as the near anonymity of her articles in the “poor little” Dial, in Waldo’s phrase, had dulled the impact of her incisive critiques and allegorical fiction. Conversation topics in recent years had strayed ever farther from Greek myth, allowing Margaret to make “wide digressions” into “autobiographic illustration” on “Culture, Ignorance, Vanity, Prudence, Patience,” and “Health.” But in 1843–44, only sixteen women purchased tickets—“there is no persuading people to be interested in one always or long even,” she sighed to Waldo. Margaret decided this series would be the last. It had been six years “of such relations . . . with so many, & so various minds!” At one time, the classes had swelled to include Julia Ward, a New York City socialite engaged to marry the Boston reformer Samuel Gridley Howe, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who lived with her lawyer husband in Boston before moving to Seneca Falls. Now the closing session in late April brought tears from the sixteen stalwarts, as well as bouquets of purple heliotrope and passionflowers. “Life is worth living—is it not?” Margaret asked, and collapsed on Cary Sturgis’s couch afterward for a rest.
The final issue of The Dial appeared the same month. Margaret’s single contribution was a fictional dialogue between two old friends over their weakening bond. “Our intercourse no longer ministers to my thoughts, to my hopes,” declares one. “Ah! you have become indifferent to me,” cries the other, only to be admonished that “reason seems cold because it is calm.” Margaret’s dialogue was framed by two of Sam Ward’s poems, “The Twin Loves” and “The Consolers.” The issue was thick with poetry—by Thoreau, Ellery Channing, and Waldo, including his own verse commentary on a fading friendship, “The Visit.”
Margaret had been right. The Dial under Waldo Emerson was more than ever a matter of friends writing for one another—and, in this farewell issue at least, quite often about friendship. The circle had contracted, become suffocating, stifling, small. Now that both of her professional outlets in Boston were gone, Margaret saw that these intellectual proving grounds had finally come to limit her range of influence. She had reason to “doubt whether this climate will ripen my fruit.”
In early June, Cary came to stay with her in Cambridge while Margaret’s mother spent two weeks in Concord helping Ellen with the new baby. Margaret would always find reasons to envy Cary, through whom “the stream of love flows full & free enough to upbear your life.” Waldo’s love for Cary, Margaret knew, though unspoken and never to be acted upon, was balm. For Cary, “The keel does not grate against the rocky bottom,” the painful depths of rejection Margaret had experienced. Yet if Cary could not have Waldo as a partner in “Reality,” how different was Cary’s situation from Margaret’s own intensifyin
g belief that “I am not fitted to be loved”? Margaret now prepared herself to be “as much alone as possible,” to accept that a solitary life “is best for me.” The two friends managed a happy coexistence this summer, an “independent life in the still house.” It was a way of life she might try again, but never again in Cambridge, she decided. With Richard graduating in August, Margaret longed to “get beyond reach” of the college bell’s “clang.” When the lease on the Ellery Street house expired in September, she would give it up.
Idling in the nursery at Concord was not the answer either. Talking with Waldo again in July, taking the measure of his “transcendental fatalism,” helped her see this. She understood fully now that her “disappointments” in Waldo, as she wrote to him in a letter that must have felt like a parting handshake, were the result of “a youthful ignorance in me which asked of you what was not in your nature to give.” Her last Dial contribution had said much the same. “Life here slumbers and steals on like the river,” she added, thinking of the lazy afternoons she’d spent basking in the sun on a favorite boulder beside the Concord River at the Old Manse. “A very good place for a sage, but not for the lyrist or orator.” If Margaret would sing or speak, and be heard, it must be from elsewhere. Perhaps, her words hinted, Waldo himself would do well to shift his own base of operations. Margaret would not rent the house across the road.
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