Fuller, (Sarah) Margaret (1810-1850)

US author and reformer. She was the editor of The Dial, an important transcendentalist magazine 1839-44 (see transcendentalism, and was noted for her public ‘conversations’ calling for the enlightenment of the women of Boston during the same period. She became the literary critic for the New York Tribune in 1844. The following year she published Woman in the Nineteenth Century, which explored the status of women in society.

Fuller was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and tutored by her father, before beginning her adult life as a teacher and writer. Later, while on assignment in Italy, she joined Giuseppe Mazzini's doomed nationalist revolt in 1848. Fuller was lost at sea while returning to the USA in 1850.