Megan Marshall, who teaches at Emerson College, Boston, is the author of The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism.
Where to begin? It’s the biographer’s fundamental dilemma. These days it’s a rare biography that opens with a recital of its subject’s pedigree, then works its way methodically from cradle to grave. Chronology is both a gift and a curse, offering an attractively simple narrative structure but risking the tedium of ever-forward motion. Why not borrow the sure-fire...
In ‘Margaret Fuller Drowned’, a sonnet of the early 1970s, Robert Lowell, whose ancestor James Russell Lowell had been skewered by Fuller’s pen more than a century earlier, sums up what’s commonly known about Fuller. ‘You had everything to rattle the men who wrote,’ he begins, addressing her as ‘the first American woman?’ (emphasis on the...
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