[1] She later had more formal schooling and became a teacher before, in 1839, she began overseeing her Conversations series: classes for women meant to compensate for their lack of access to higher education.

[2] She became the first editor of the transcendentalist journal The Dial in 1840, which was the year her writing career started to succeed,[3] before joining the staff of the New-York Tribune under Horace Greeley in 1844.

[16] On June 17, 1825, Fuller attended the ceremony at which the American Revolutionary War hero Marquis de Lafayette laid the cornerstone of the Bunker Hill Monument 50 years after the battle.

[17] The 15-year-old Fuller introduced herself to Lafayette in a letter which concluded: "Should we both live, and it is possible to a female, to whom the avenues of glory are seldom accessible, I will recal my name to your recollection."

[26] Fuller hoped to earn her living through journalism and translation; her first published work, a response to historian George Bancroft, appeared in November 1834 in the North American Review.

She then accepted an invitation to teach under Hiram Fuller (no relation) at the Greene Street School in Providence, Rhode Island, in April 1837 with the unusually high salary of $1,000 (~$26,929 in 2023) per year.

[39] Fuller intended to compensate for the lack of women's education[40] with discussions and debates focused on subjects including the fine arts, history, mythology, literature, and nature.

[44] A number of significant figures in the women's rights movement attended these gatherings, including Sophia Dana Ripley, Caroline Sturgis,[45] and Maria White Lowell.

[51] In the summer of 1843, she traveled to Chicago, Milwaukee, Niagara Falls, and Buffalo, New York;[52] while there, she interacted with several Native Americans, including members of the Ottawa and the Chippewa tribes.

[65] She moved to New York that autumn and joined Horace Greeley's New-York Tribune as a literary critic, becoming the first full-time book reviewer in American journalism[66] and, by 1846, the publication's first female editor.

[94] Fuller informed her mother about Ossoli and Angelino in August 1849 in a letter that explained that she had kept silent so as not to upset her "but it has become necessary, on account of the child, for us to live publicly and permanently together.

"[96] The couple supported Giuseppe Mazzini's movement for the establishment of a Roman Republic proclaimed on February 9, 1849, after it had been voted by the Constituent Assembly, elected by universal male suffrage in January 1849.

[85][99] When the patriots they supported met defeat,[100] the couple believed it safer to flee Rome and decided to move to Florence and, in 1850, to the United States.

[102] Fuller used her experience in Italy to begin a book about the history of the Roman Republic—a work she may have begun as early as 1847—[103] and hoped to find an American publisher after a British one rejected it.

[107] A few days after writing this, Fuller, Ossoli, and their child began a five-week return voyage to the United States aboard the ship Elizabeth, an American merchant freighter carrying cargo that included mostly marble from Carrara.

[122] The inscription reads, in part:[123] By birth a child of New England By adoption a citizen of Rome By genius belonging to the world Within a week after her death, Horace Greeley suggested to Emerson that a biography of Fuller, to be called Margaret and Her Friends, be prepared quickly "before the interest excited by her sad decease has passed away".

[125] In February 1852, The Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli was published,[126] edited by Emerson, James Freeman Clarke, and William Henry Channing, though much of the work was censored or reworded.

[138] She admired the work of Emanuel Swedenborg, who believed men and women shared "an angelic ministry", as she wrote, as well as Charles Fourier, who placed "Woman on an entire equality with Man".

[155] This personality was the inspiration for the character Hester Prynne in Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel The Scarlet Letter, specifically her radical thinking about "the whole race of womanhood".

[160] An 1860 essay collection, Historical Pictures Retouched, by Caroline Healey Dall, called Fuller's Woman in the Nineteenth Century "doubtless the most brilliant, complete, and scholarly statement ever made on the subject".

[76] Thoreau also thought highly of the book, suggesting that its strength came in part from Fuller's conversational ability, and called it "rich extempore writing, talking with pen in hand".

[164] Anthony, along with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Matilda Joslyn Gage, wrote in their History of Woman Suffrage that Fuller "was the precursor of the Women's Rights agitation".

Martineau said that Fuller was a talker rather than an activist, that she had "shallow conceits" and often "looked down upon persons who acted instead of talking finely ... and despised those who, like myself, could not adopt her scale of valuation".

[170] The influential editor Rufus Wilmot Griswold, who believed she went against his notion of feminine modesty, referred to Woman in the Nineteenth Century as "an eloquent expression of her discontent at having been created female".

[172] English writer and critic Matthew Arnold scoffed at Fuller's conversations as well, saying, "My G–d, [sic] what rot did she and the other female dogs of Boston talk about Greek mythology!

I think Margaret speaks of many things that should not be spoken of.Fuller had angered fellow poet and critic James Russell Lowell when she reviewed his work, calling him "absolutely wanting in the true spirit and tone of poesy ... his verse is stereotyped, his thought sounds no depth; and posterity will not remember him.

[176] Referring to her as Miranda, Lowell wrote that she stole old ideas and presented them as her own, she was genuine only in her spite and "when acting as censor, she privately blows a censer of vanity 'neath her own nose".

Her obituary in the newspaper she had once edited, the Daily Tribune, said that her works had a few great sentiments, "but as a whole they must commend themselves mainly by their vigor of thought and habitual fearlessness rather than freedom of utterance".

[179] Years later, Hawthorne's son Julian wrote, "The majority of readers will, I think, not be inconsolable that poor Margaret Fuller has at last taken her place with the numberless other dismal frauds who fill the limbo of human pretension and failure.

[183][184] On June 21, 2016, a historical marker in honor of Fuller was placed in Polhill Park in Beacon, NY, to commemorate her staying at Van Vliet boarding house.