Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Authors Like
By Lisanne Swart · 6 authors · Early Feminism & Transcendentalism · Updated July 2026
Margaret Fuller wrote Woman in the Nineteenth Century in 1845, arguing for women's full intellectual and social equality decades before organized suffrage movements existed, and did so while working as America's first female foreign correspondent and moving in the same Transcendentalist circles as Emerson and Thoreau. Her combination of rigorous argument and lived, boundary-breaking practice makes her a genuine originator rather than a follower of ideas that would take generations to become mainstream. The writers below share her project of arguing for women's full personhood, whether through direct treatise, fiction, or activism.
Readers who enjoy Margaret Fuller often turn to Mary Wollstonecraft for the earlier foundational feminist treatise Fuller's own argument builds on, Simone de Beauvoir for the fullest twentieth-century philosophical extension of the same argument, Virginia Woolf for feminist argument carried into fiction and essay in a later century, George Eliot for a contemporary novelist working similar questions about women's intellectual life, Elizabeth Cady Stanton for the direct organizing and activism that followed Fuller's theoretical groundwork, and Ralph Waldo Emerson for the Transcendentalist tradition and intellectual circle Fuller belonged to.
Similar Voice & Approach
Mary Wollstonecraft
Wollstonecraft's 1792 treatise is the direct philosophical predecessor Fuller built on half a century later, arguing that women's apparent intellectual inferiority resulted from lack of education and social opportunity rather than any natural incapacity. Fuller extended and Americanized many of Wollstonecraft's core arguments.
Read Wollstonecraft for the foundational feminist argument Fuller's own work directly extends. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is essential historical context.
Simone de Beauvoir
De Beauvoir's The Second Sex, published over a century after Fuller's Woman in the Nineteenth Century, extends Fuller's argument about women's constrained social and intellectual position into a far more systematic philosophical framework, examining how women are constructed as "other" throughout Western thought and culture.
Read de Beauvoir for Fuller's argument developed into a full, rigorous twentieth-century philosophical system. The Second Sex is the essential extension.
Virginia Woolf
Woolf carries Fuller's feminist argument into a later century and a different literary form, arguing in A Room of One's Own that women's creative and intellectual freedom depends on concrete material conditions — money and private space — echoing Fuller's own insistence on real, structural rather than merely rhetorical equality.
Read Woolf for Fuller's argument about women's intellectual freedom carried into modernist essay and fiction. A Room of One's Own is the essential entry point.
→ See all books by Virginia WoolfGeorge Eliot
Eliot, Fuller's contemporary in the broader Victorian literary world, dramatizes women's constrained intellectual ambition through fiction rather than direct treatise, most clearly in Middlemarch's Dorothea Brooke, whose genuine intelligence and idealism find few outlets in the social world available to her.
Read Eliot for Fuller's central concern about women's thwarted intellectual ambition dramatized through fiction. Middlemarch is essential, if demanding.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Stanton took Fuller's theoretical argument for women's equality and built it into organized political action, co-organizing the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention and the American suffrage movement that Fuller's earlier writing helped make intellectually possible.
Read Stanton for the direct organizing and activism that grew out of the theoretical groundwork Fuller laid. Eighty Years and More is the essential memoir.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Emerson was Fuller's close intellectual companion and fellow Transcendentalist, and the two edited The Dial together, sharing a conviction in individual conscience, direct experience, and self-reliance that Fuller applied specifically and pointedly to women's intellectual and social position.
Read Emerson for the Transcendentalist philosophical foundation Fuller shared and then extended into an explicitly feminist argument. Self-Reliance is the essential companion essay.
More from the shelf
Frequently asked questions about authors like Margaret Fuller
Who should I read if I like Margaret Fuller?
Readers who enjoy Margaret Fuller often turn to Mary Wollstonecraft for the earlier foundational feminist treatise Fuller's own argument builds on, Simone de Beauvoir for the fullest twentieth-century philosophical extension of the same argument, Virginia Woolf for feminist argument carried into fiction and essay in a later century, George Eliot for a contemporary novelist working similar questions about women's intellectual life, Elizabeth Cady Stanton for the direct organizing and activism that followed Fuller's theoretical groundwork, and Ralph Waldo Emerson for the Transcendentalist tradition and intellectual circle Fuller belonged to.
Was Margaret Fuller connected to Ralph Waldo Emerson?
Yes, Fuller was Emerson's close intellectual companion and fellow Transcendentalist, and the two edited the influential journal The Dial together. Both shared a conviction in individual conscience, direct experience, and self-reliance, which Fuller applied specifically and pointedly to arguing for women's intellectual and social equality.
What should I read after Woman in the Nineteenth Century?
Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman provides the foundational treatise Fuller's argument directly extends. Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex offers the fullest twentieth-century philosophical development of similar ideas. For the organizing and activism that grew out of Fuller's theoretical groundwork, Elizabeth Cady Stanton's Eighty Years and More is essential.
Was Margaret Fuller America's first female foreign correspondent?
Yes, Fuller worked as America's first female foreign correspondent, reporting from Europe for the New York Tribune, including firsthand coverage of the 1848 revolutions in Italy. This combination of rigorous feminist argument and lived, boundary-breaking professional practice distinguishes her from writers who argued for equality only in theory.
