"Charles Capper's first volume of a projected two-volume life offers much detail to help us appreciate a remarkable mind....Scholars of this period should value Capper's clarity as well as his thoroughness; and feminists should rejoice that Margaret Fuller's history has been enlarged and deepened."—Historical Journal of Massachusetts
"Capper's study emerges as the authoritative account of Fuller's early life for its original and timely scholarship, rich historical texture, and balanced interpretations. Capper writes in an engaging style that gives vitality to the life of thought he chronicles."—Legacy
"This inherently feminist book results in the richest account we have yet of Fuller's formative years....Capper matches Fuller (and she was an astounding reader) in his study of the classical, republican, romantic and Transcentalist thought that influenced hers. Hence he is more able than any previous biographer to do justice to the nuances of her aesthetic commitments and to her religious, political and social thought."—The Nation
"Capper's superb biography is the first full-length modern rumination on Fuller's enduring riddles....Capper removes Fuller from the realm of the exemplary and restores her connections to the world around her—and to readers as well....Capper's mastery of the broad trans-Atlantic cerebral world in which Fuller lived is total, and he manages at once to convey the social pathos of her situation and the covert intellectual excitement....He is a master of intellectual genealogies and of the finely hewn debates and fierce contestation they spawned, and he conveys eloquently the living presence of the life of the mind."—Christine Stansell, The New Republic
"What a stunning book Charles Capper has written!...What Capper has done—simply, elegantly, and stirringly—is to take the tools of the biographer's craft and put them to exquisite use in fashioning a fascinating portrait of the first major woman intellectual in the United States. It is an absorbing story, fraught with the kind of rich detail and easy readability that might characterize a good novel."—Mary Kupiec Cayton, Journal of American History
"If Capper's second volume, on Fuller's public years, equals his first, he will have produced not only a definitive biography but also a broadly conceived addition to American intellectual and social history."—Jane H. Pease, American Historical Review
"Her short, dramatic life seems to invite constant reinterpretation, and many biographers have been drawn to it. Charles Capper is the latest and the best of them: his treatment of her life, and especially her work, marks an important break with his predecessors....Eminently readable....Illuminating."—Women's Review of Books
"At last, a definitive biography of the great American feminist writer Margaret Fuller. Only a scholar of uncommon learning, like Charles Capper, could have dealt with so formidably learned a subject and located her in the intellectual world of her times."—Daniel Walker Howe, Oxford University
"Charles Capper has written an engrossing biography which conveys the adventure of Margaret Fuller's life and the complexity of her thought. It places Fuller solidly among the major writers and intellectuals of her generation. And it is a good read!"—Linda K. Kerber, University of Iowa
"Charles Capper has written the best biography of Fuller yet. He has skillfully re-created early nineteenth-century American literary and cultural life, and placed Fuller within it. The research is superb, the writing gracious. This book will stand the test of time."—Joel Myerson, The University of South Carolina
