Margaret Fuller

During an era when few women had professional careers, Margaret Fuller was a prominent journalist, critic, and women’s rights activist known for
her pointed commentary. Together with Ralph Waldo Emerson and George Ripley, she edited the Dial, a journal dedicated to advancing the literary and philosophical movement known as Transcendentalism, which stressed the unity of all creation. In 1839, Fuller began a women’s conversation group in Boston that led to her landmark publication, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845). Countering contemporary law, Fuller argued that women should enter into true partnerships through marriage, with equal property rights.

While working in Italy as a war correspondent covering the revolutions of 1848–49, Fuller met art-ist Thomas Hicks in Rome. In this portrait, he imagined her in the atmospheric gloom of a Venetian palazzo with a gondola in the distance. In 1850, Fuller perished in a shipwreck while returning to the United States.