Reading List

Authors Like Margaret Fuller

On 6 November 1839 Margaret Fuller began a series of paid “Conversations” for women in Boston: weekly discussions in which she asked a room of educated women to think aloud about Greek myth, art and ethics, and expected them to answer. Emerson had already asked her to edit the new Transcendentalist journal The Dial, which she ran from 1840 to 1842 for a salary that was never paid. Her essay “The Great Lawsuit” appeared there and grew into Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), usually called the first major feminist work in the United States. Horace Greeley then hired her at the New-York Tribune as its book critic, and in 1846 sent her to Europe as its first female foreign correspondent. She met George Sand and Mazzini, joined the cause of the Roman Republic in 1849, had a son with Giovanni Ossoli, and drowned with both of them when their ship ran aground off Fire Island on 19 July 1850. Readers come to her for a mind that would not stay in the place it was assigned. The writers below either moved in her circle, argued the same case for women's full personhood, or carried that argument into the next century.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Early feminism · Transcendentalism · The nineteenth-century essay · Updated October 2026

Quick answer

If you love Margaret Fuller, start with Mary Wollstonecraft, whose Vindication is the book hers answers fifty years later, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, the friend who gave her The Dial. For the same argument in fiction, read George Eliot, who compared the two women in print in 1855. For what came after her, Elizabeth Cady Stanton. And for Fuller herself, Megan Marshall's Pulitzer-winning biography.

10 authors like Margaret Fuller

01
Where the argument begins · Closest match

Mary Wollstonecraft

English · b. 1759 · Philosopher

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) argued that women only appear inferior to men because they are denied education, and that both sexes should be treated as rational beings. Wollstonecraft died in 1797, eleven days after giving birth to her second daughter, the future Mary Shelley.

The book Woman in the Nineteenth Century is in conversation with. Wollstonecraft argues from reason and education; Fuller takes the same case and adds the inner life — what a woman's mind might become, not only what it is owed. Both were judged as much by their private lives as by their arguments, which is why George Eliot wrote about them together.

— Lisanne

Every book by Mary Wollstonecraft →

02
Her friend and editor

Ralph Waldo Emerson

American · b. 1803 · Essayist

Emerson was the central figure of New England Transcendentalism. Nature (1836) and the essays collected in 1841, including “Self-Reliance”, set out its faith in individual intuition over inherited authority. He offered Fuller the editorship of The Dial in 1839 and took it over himself after she left in 1842. After her death he co-edited the Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (1852), which smoothed over much of her life in Italy.

Read him for the philosophy Fuller shared and then pushed further. “Self-Reliance” assumes a free man; Woman in the Nineteenth Century asks what self-reliance would mean for someone the law and custom did not treat as a full person. His essays are the calmer half of a long, sometimes strained friendship.

— Lisanne

Every book by Ralph Waldo Emerson →

03
The Concord neighbour

Henry David Thoreau

American · b. 1817 · Essayist

Thoreau published his early poems and essays in The Dial, the journal Fuller edited. Walden (1854) is his account of two years in a cabin by Walden Pond, and “Civil Disobedience” (1849) his argument for refusing to obey unjust laws. In July 1850, at Emerson's request, he went to Fire Island to search the shore after Fuller's shipwreck; her body was never recovered.

Thoreau's subject is the individual against convention, the same ground as Fuller's, but he could make his experiment simply by walking out of town. Read Walden and “Civil Disobedience” next to Woman in the Nineteenth Century and you see how differently the Transcendentalist idea of freedom landed on a man and a woman.

— Lisanne

Every book by Henry David Thoreau →

04
The novelist who wrote her in

Nathaniel Hawthorne

American · b. 1804 · Novelist

Hawthorne lived at the Brook Farm commune from April to November 1841, and drew on it for The Blithedale Romance (1852). Its proud, eloquent reformer Zenobia is often said to be modelled on Fuller, who visited Brook Farm but never lived there; Hawthorne insisted his characters were fictitious. The Scarlet Letter (1850) is his novel of a woman punished by Puritan Boston.

The view of Fuller's world from a sceptic inside it. Hawthorne knew the Transcendentalists well and distrusted their reform schemes, and Zenobia is what a brilliant, outspoken woman looked like to a novelist who admired and resented her at once. Read it as fiction, not portrait, but it shows the reception Fuller's kind of woman met.

— Lisanne
05
The woman she went to Paris to meet

George Sand

French · b. 1804 · Novelist

Sand was the most famous woman writer in Europe in the 1840s, known for novels about women trapped in bad marriages, for wearing men's clothes, and for her radical politics. Indiana was her first novel under the name George Sand; Consuelo follows a gifted singer who refuses to give up her art. Fuller met her in Paris in 1847.

Sand was living the independence Fuller argued for, in a country where it was possible to do it in public. Where Woman in the Nineteenth Century argues that a woman should develop all her powers, Consuelo imagines one who does. Read Sand for the European life Fuller went looking for in 1846.

— Lisanne
06
The argument as fiction

George Eliot

English · b. 1819 · Novelist

Before she wrote fiction, Mary Ann Evans was a translator, critic and sub-editor of The Westminster Review; on 13 October 1855 she published “Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft” in The Leader, one of the earliest essays to read the two together. As George Eliot she wrote The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch, whose Dorothea Brooke has an ardent mind and nowhere to use it.

Eliot wrote about Fuller and then did in the novel what Fuller did in the essay: she put a clever, idealistic woman into a society with no room for her and followed the consequences honestly. Middlemarch's Finale is the best answer in fiction to the question Woman in the Nineteenth Century raises.

— Lisanne

Every book by George Eliot →

07
The movement that followed

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

American · b. 1815 · Activist and writer

Stanton co-organised the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 and wrote its Declaration of Sentiments, the founding document of the American women's rights movement. With Susan B. Anthony and Matilda Joslyn Gage she compiled the History of Woman Suffrage, whose first volume (1881) is dedicated in part to Fuller's memory. After the Civil War she opposed the Fifteenth Amendment, at times in openly racist language, which split the movement.

Fuller supplied the argument; Stanton built the organisation. The History of Woman Suffrage calls Fuller “the precursor of the Women's Rights agitation”. Read Stanton's memoir for what the case for women's equality became once it had conventions, petitions and decades of setbacks behind it.

— Lisanne

Every book by Elizabeth Cady Stanton →

08
The next century's version

Virginia Woolf

English · b. 1882 · Novelist and essayist

Woolf was one of the central modernist novelists, author of Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927). A Room of One's Own, from lectures she gave at two Cambridge women's colleges in 1928, argues that women need money and a room of their own to write. Three Guineas sets the patriarchal system of her own country beside the fascism rising in Europe.

The closest twentieth-century match for Fuller's way of arguing: an essay that thinks out loud, moves through history and invented examples, and is personal without becoming memoir. Woolf adds what Fuller only gestured at — the material conditions, money and space, that make a free mind possible.

— Lisanne

Every book by Virginia Woolf →

09
The argument at full scale

Simone de Beauvoir

French · b. 1908 · Philosopher and novelist · Prix Goncourt 1954

De Beauvoir was born in Paris in 1908 and became one of the central figures of French existentialism. The Second Sex (1949) examines how women have been made into the “other” through biology, history, myth and everyday life. Her novel The Mandarins, about Paris intellectuals after the war, won the Prix Goncourt in 1954.

The Second Sex is what Woman in the Nineteenth Century becomes a century later, with philosophy, history and anthropology behind it. Both books range across myth, literature and law to show that “woman” is a role imposed rather than a nature; de Beauvoir does it systematically where Fuller did it by intuition and quotation.

— Lisanne

Every book by Simone de Beauvoir →

10
Fuller's biographer

Megan Marshall

American · b. 1954 · Biographer · Pulitzer 2014

Marshall writes biographies of American women writers and thinkers. The Peabody Sisters (2005), about Elizabeth, Mary and Sophia Peabody, the last of whom married Hawthorne, was a Pulitzer finalist and won the Francis Parkman Prize. Margaret Fuller: A New American Life won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 2014. She has also written Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast (2017).

The best way back into Fuller herself. Marshall uses letters and journals the 1852 Memoirs censored to give the full woman — the editor, the reporter in revolutionary Rome, the mother — and The Peabody Sisters fills in the Boston circle around her. Read her when you want the life behind the essays.

— Lisanne

Where to start if you loved Margaret Fuller

If you want the book hers answers, read Mary Wollstonecraft.

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, then Fuller again.

If you want her circle, read Ralph Waldo Emerson.

“Self-Reliance”, next to Woman in the Nineteenth Century.

If you want the argument as a novel, read George Eliot.

Middlemarch, for Dorothea Brooke.

If you want Fuller's own life, read Megan Marshall.

Margaret Fuller: A New American Life: the Pulitzer-winning biography.

Frequently asked questions about authors like Margaret Fuller

Who should I read if I love Margaret Fuller?

Mary Wollstonecraft first — A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) is the book Fuller's argument extends. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau were her Transcendentalist circle. George Eliot and George Sand put the same questions into fiction. Elizabeth Cady Stanton turned the argument into a movement, and Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir carried it into the twentieth century. For Fuller's own life, read Megan Marshall's biography.

What books are like Woman in the Nineteenth Century?

Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) is the earlier treatise it builds on. Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own (1929) is the closest later essay in voice, and Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949) is the fullest philosophical development of the same argument. Elizabeth Cady Stanton's Declaration of Sentiments (1848) shows the same ideas turned into a political programme.

Did Margaret Fuller and Emerson edit The Dial together?

Not at the same time. Emerson offered Fuller the editorship when the journal was founded, and she edited it from 1840 to 1842; Emerson then took over until it closed in 1844. He was a close friend and contributor throughout, and after her death he co-edited the Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (1852).

Was Margaret Fuller America's first female foreign correspondent?

She was the New-York Tribune's first female foreign correspondent, and is often described as the first for any major American newspaper. Horace Greeley sent her to Europe in 1846; she reported from England, France and Italy, including the Roman Republic of 1849, in dispatches over four years. At the Tribune she was also the first full-time book reviewer in American journalism.

Is Zenobia in The Blithedale Romance based on Margaret Fuller?

Zenobia is often said to be modelled on Fuller, and the novel is set in a commune based on Brook Farm, where Hawthorne lived in 1841 and Fuller was a frequent visitor. Hawthorne said his characters were fictitious, and critics have long questioned that. Fuller had died two years before the novel came out.

What is the best biography of Margaret Fuller?

Megan Marshall's Margaret Fuller: A New American Life (2013), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 2014. It draws on letters and journals that the 1852 Memoirs, edited by Emerson, W.H. Channing and James Freeman Clarke, left out or reworded.

How did Margaret Fuller die?

She drowned on 19 July 1850, when the ship Elizabeth, bringing her home from Italy, ran aground on a sandbar off Fire Island, New York. Giovanni Ossoli and their son, Angelino, also died.

Footnotes

  1. Margaret Fuller — Wikipedia
  2. Margaret Fuller chronology — The Woman and the Myth, The Walden Woods Project
  3. Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft — George Eliot Archive
  4. Megan Marshall — The Pulitzer Prizes
  5. Megan Marshall — Wikipedia
  6. The Blithedale Romance — Wikipedia
  7. History of Woman Suffrage — Wikipedia
  8. Why the Women's Rights Movement Split Over the 15th Amendment — National Park Service

List last reviewed 15 October 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

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