She began drafting sermons. Maybe if she tried setting down her views, she could persuade herself of them. And she told James about them: could she have hoped he’d deliver her sermons in Louisville? Writing from a biblical text he’d also used, she teased James that she could do as well as or better than he. But in the end she was dissatisfied. Instead of unfolding spiritual lessons, she “could only write reveries,” Margaret explained to James, and threw out the drafts. Writing sermons with no particular audience in mind, with no prospect of delivering them herself, was bound to lead to frustration. The experience of being shut out from the ministry fed her religious doubt; confronting exclusion so directly was painful.
She tried essays next, submitting them to the Christian Examiner, the prestigious Unitarian journal that had solicited James’s speech at graduation from Harvard Divinity School the summer before—only to see them turned down. She finished her translation of Goethe’s Tasso and sent it to James, who was enthusiastic. But the prospect of publication, offered initially through a connection of Eliza Farrar’s, vanished. She’d let herself hope she might put her facility with languages to use in translating for an income, but the scheme now seemed untenable, especially as she so far lacked the brazenness to “walk into the Boston establishments and ask them to buy my work.” Here, “I have no friend at once efficient and sympathizing,” she wrote in a letter asking James to try publishers in the West on her behalf. Women writers frequently leaned on a male relative or friend to handle such negotiations, and then, in order to show a properly feminine lack of ambition, claimed in a preface to have had publication pressed on them. But James could perform no such magic in a territory where most residents didn’t even know the German Romantic writers well enough to despise them, he explained.
The question nagged—what was she to become? Margaret liked encouraging James in his vocation—he’d written to thank her for the inspiration of her “onward spirit”—so long as she didn’t think too hard about the disparity, her sense that “your progress is vast compared to mine.” Perhaps she should accept that she was meant simply “to feed” James’s “intellectual burner with pine chips,” as she proposed in a letter. There might even be some distinction in an indirect path to power. “Was I not born to fill the ear of some Frederick or Czar Peter with information and suggestions on which he might reflect and act”?
After more than a year at Groton, her situation had changed little, except that seventeen-year-old William Henry returned for a brief stint in her classroom before departing to the West Indies to seek his fortune. When he left, she added three village children to her home school, receiving a small income of her own. “Earning money—think of that,” she wrote to James. “I shall be a professional character yet.” Perhaps she could save enough eventually to support a trip to Italy. But the excitement of “beginning to serve my apprenticeship to the world,” as she half-jokingly described her experiment in wage earning, faded as a second Groton winter approached: “Life grows scantier, employments accumulate,” and “I feel less and less confidence in my powers,” she wrote to James.
The sense of being unmoored, of not belonging wherever she went, persisted. “I am more and more dissatisfied with this world, and cannot find a home in it,” Margaret confided to Almira Barlow, recently married to a minister in Brooklyn. “Heaven knows I have striven enough to make my mind its own place. I have resolution for the contest, and will not shrink or faint, but I know not, just at this moment, where to turn.” And then, a chance conversation with her father landed her in print.
The two had read an essay by George Bancroft in the North American Review in which the young historian, hoping to stir up controversy, dissected the character of Brutus, a cherished idol to many in the fledgling American republic. Bancroft charged Brutus with being impulsive and lacking “coolness of judgement,” and he faulted Roman historians for making him a hero simply for assassinating Julius Caesar. Timothy and Margaret were incensed—particularly Margaret, whose passion for the ancients was the great legacy of her early studies with her father. Although she had mixed feelings about her father’s teaching methods, “Roman virtue” was, for Margaret, an ideal never to be disputed. “ROME! it stands by itself, a clear Word. The power of will, the dignity of a fixed purpose is what it utters,” she had come to believe through her childhood reading. Brutus, “mild in his temper” and with “a greatness of mind, that was superior to anger, avarice and the love of pleasure,” was one of the chief exemplars of Roman virtue, she would soon argue in the pages of the Boston Daily Advertiser, refuting Bancroft’s charge.
As Margaret told Henry Hedge afterward, “My father requested me to write a little piece in answer” to Bancroft’s attack, which Timothy then sent to the Advertiser, a newspaper that circulated widely in Massachusetts. Margaret’s essay ran unsigned under the title “Brutus” on November 27, 1834. Her argument was a more sophisticated version of the “Possunt quia posse videntur” theme she’d written for her father in adolescence; she defined the elements of a noble character, then illustrated their presence in Brutus. If her defense of the Roman politician as mild of temper and superior to anger seemed to tweak Timothy, it was also an oblique articulation of her domestic struggle: she was reluctant “to lose this object of reverence from among the heart’s household gods,” she confided at the start of the essay.
Why did Timothy turn over this writing task to Margaret? He’d moved the family to Groton intending to make a name for himself with a historical work. Perhaps a mere letter to the editor was beneath his dignity. Or was he stepping aside? Timothy may have sensed Margaret’s more powerful ambition, her will to succeed. If the publication of “Brutus” was the result of Timothy’s “request”—a final assignment—it was a gift, unlike the shaded arbor in Margaret’s Grove, that his oldest child and best pupil truly needed and was happy to accept. Timothy had acted as the “friend at once efficient and sympathizing” that Margaret claimed to lack.
Yet Margaret’s letter to Henry Hedge is her only account of the venture. Could she have contrived this explanation, or played up her father’s role, to disguise her ambitious foray as the design of a man, her father? However the publication came about, Margaret had an important taste of victory—she had reached an audience at last. Her “little piece” even provoked a rebuttal from a reader in Salem, who nonetheless praised her “ability” as a writer. He “seemed to consider me as an elderly gentleman,” Margaret wrote to Henry Hedge. Never one to shy away from disputes, she took this as a compliment.
The step into print proved energizing. Margaret may have needed Timothy’s assignment and his connections to gain a foothold, but this would be the last time her father figured in her plans for publication. In the spring, James Clarke wrote announcing the start of a literary journal to be published in Cincinnati, for which he would serve as one of the editors, and asked Margaret’s help in filling the first issues. He welcomed essays on “topics of religion, morals, literature, art, or anything you feel to be worth writing about.” In a second prodding letter he urged: “Don’t be afraid, there is no public opinion here. You are throwing your ideas to help form one.” She could even “be as transcendental” as she wished.
By August of 1835, Margaret had published two lengthy book reviews in successive issues of Clarke’s Western Messenger and proposed a third. The first appeared in the June debut issue, a review of memoirs by two English writers of the infamous Blue Stocking Club, George Crabbe and Hannah More, in which Margaret traced their paths into London’s “most brilliant circle,” a circle centered on women writers and intellectuals, and beyond. For the August issue she reviewed Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s historical novel The Last Days of Pompeii, taking the opportunity to analyze the author’s complete body of work, observing a progression from the satirical toward “the ideal.” Margaret’s first literary essays—both of which revealed her interest in the formation of important literary careers—appeared unsigned in a fledgling journal published for an audience its
founder considered barely educated. But the Western Messenger was widely read in New England, where most of its writers were born and educated, though many had migrated west along with James Clarke. Margaret was the only female writer whose work appeared in these pages; James had not left her behind.
Margaret’s first reviews may have been the pieces rejected by the Christian Examiner the previous year; both were ambitious in intent but were haphazardly structured. Even Clarke, who published them gratefully, was aware of their flaws. When Margaret pressed him for criticism, “no matter how severe,” he responded that the essays were too digressive: “We feel like an explorer in a Kentucky cavern; there are so many side-passages, opening to the right and left, leading upward and downward.” Further, her language was “too elevated,” and her wide literary reference escaped her readers: “They know nothing of books.” Margaret wrote the way she spoke, Clarke told her, and her sparkling conversation could at times be “too lofty.” The digressions and allusions that entertained and impressed in Cambridge parlors were off-putting in print.
Yet Margaret was true to her word, accepting James’s “severe” criticism and eager to correct the missteps of “one [who] has talked so much and written so little.” Margaret understood that she had not yet learned to craft her thoughts in formal prose, and her isolation—her desperate need to converse—fed the problem. “This going into mental solitude is desperately trying,” she’d written to Henry Hedge; “to me the expression of thought and feeling is to the mind what respiration is to the lungs.” These awkward early attempts convinced Margaret, whose innate verbal facility had never failed her, that “the art of writing, like all other arts, requires an apprenticeship,” and she was now willing to serve it. “My grand object is improvement,” she assured James, to whom she had once admitted her fear that she might “die and leave no trace.” Now she wished to leave more than a trace: an indelible mark of distinction.
Where once she had resisted mixing with the “common-place people” of Groton, Margaret now made up her mind to “engage” with them. At times she would “talk incessantly” with her neighbors, “full of intense curiosity” to understand “that strange whole the American publick” she hoped to address. The real possibility of reaching a public through her writing began to ease the sense of deprivation and envy she felt at being barred from the ministry. A year before she had written with regret to Henry Hedge that “I am not yet intimate with any of the lower class. I have not the advantages of a clergy man.” Her break into the writing profession gave a purpose and legitimacy to seeking out both the “common” and the “low,” as she initially perceived Groton’s gentry and its working class.
By August too, Margaret had spent several weeks with the Farrars on a tour of upstate New York’s natural wonders. She’d begged her father for his “consent” to the time off and for the funds to support the trip: “Oh do sympathize with me—do feel about it as I do—.” She even proposed that Timothy reduce the sum of her eventual inheritance, her “portion” of the family estate, by two hundred dollars, if advancing her the fifty-seven dollars necessary to cover the cost of the excursion created anxiety for him now. Timothy agreed to the plan without making the deduction, and soon Margaret was on her way by steamboat up the Hudson River to West Point and Trenton Falls in a traveling party that included one of the Farrars’ student boarders, Sam Ward. Seven years younger than Margaret and captivatingly handsome, the son of a Boston financier, Sam Ward was wealthy and talented enough to toy with the idea of a career as an artist after graduation from Harvard. The two became fast friends on the journey, and Sam readily agreed to serve as Margaret’s escort to Newport on her way back to Boston, where she planned to introduce him to Anna Barker, his female counterpart in youth, good looks, and, for Margaret, magnetic power.
The “romantic rocks” at Trenton Falls and the “gorgeous prospect” from the summit of Kaatskill Mountain, its “immense hotel” seemingly “dropped there by magic,” contrasted with the social whirl of “dressed dolls” (excluding Anna, of course) and moneyed men at Newport, gave spice to Margaret’s letters home. Here was an opportunity to try out her skills as a travel writer. When, in late summer, the Farrars proposed that Margaret join them, along with Sam Ward and Anna Barker, on a yearlong tour of Europe, departing from Boston in the summer of 1836, Margaret began working to persuade her father of the necessity—and practicality—of this longer and far more costly journey. She needed the schooling of a European tour to fulfill her promise as a writer; the investment now would yield rewards later. Despite her family’s straitened finances, Margaret began to believe it would happen.
Her determination to make the journey intensified after her meeting at summer’s end with Harriet Martineau, England’s best-known woman writer, who was traveling in the United States to gather material for a book on contemporary life in Britain’s former colonies. Martineau, who had made her name with a series of popular books explaining the principles of political economy to general readers—the audience Margaret hoped to win with her own writing—was staying with the Farrars in Cambridge. Margaret expected to “see her,” she wrote to James Clarke, “but it is not probable I shall become acquainted.” She knew that “many will be seeking” out Martineau, “and as I have no name nor fame I shall not have much chance.” Earlier that summer she had failed, despite her proficiency in the German language, to attract the interest of Dr. Francis Lieber, a German reformer passing through Boston. Though a friend of James, Lieber evidently did not possess his capacity to appreciate intellectual distinction in women: “I was to him only Miss Fuller, an unmarried female of no mark or likelihood,” Margaret sighed.
But Martineau, like Eliza Farrar and Ellen Kilshaw before her, instantly saw Margaret’s promise—indeed, recognized her as a kindred spirit. The two attended Harvard commencement together. Seated beside her new friend—a true international celebrity—as a succession of talented seniors took the podium to exhibit their public speaking abilities, Margaret inwardly prayed that “I should not be haunted with recollections of ‘aims unreached occasions lost,’” she wrote afterward in her journal. She prayed, as well, that Harriet Martineau might become the “intellectual guide” she still sought, the friend who “would do—what none has ever done yet, comprehend me wholly, mentally and morally, and enable me better to comprehend myself.” More than either Eliza Farrar or Maria Child, Margaret recognized, Harriet Martineau “has what I want”: “vigorous reasoning powers, invention, clear views of her objects, and she has trained to the best means of execution.” When Martineau learned of Margaret’s projected European trip, she shifted her own return voyage so that she could sail with the Farrars, and she offered to serve as Margaret’s entrée into society—Martineau’s own “brilliant circle”—once the party arrived in England.
Margaret was also edging into influential circles close to home. Ralph Waldo Emerson had settled halfway between Boston and Groton in the county seat at Concord, Massachusetts, on returning from his own yearlong European tour. The third in a line of influential ministers stretching back to colonial times, Emerson had shocked Boston by resigning a prestigious pulpit when his congregation refused to support him in abandoning the ritual of communion—a practice he considered primitive and idolatrous. His firm defiance had gained him followers in the younger generation of Unitarian ministers—Clarke, Hedge, and others who were Margaret’s friends; Emerson’s proud self-exile conferred dignity on their own errands into the wilderness. Whenever possible, they attended Emerson’s increasingly popular Boston lectures espousing a nonsectarian inquiry into human nature, which, as one early listener, the gifted teacher and Transcendentalist writer Elizabeth Peabody, wrote, gathered together “all the most important ideas—which we value—as this age’s spirit.”
Now that they were almost neighbors, Margaret angled for a meeting with “that only clergyman of all possible clergymen who eludes my acquaintance.” She considered his the most powerful “of any American mind,” and she
wished to “know him in private.” But Emerson, who continued preaching in country pulpits on a “supply” basis, always seemed to appear in Groton when Margaret was away. Henry Hedge aided the cause by sending Emerson the manuscript of Margaret’s translation of Tasso. Now Waldo, as he was known to close friends, the name passed down from an ancestral Puritan family, was asking to meet Margaret. In the summer of 1835, she wrote James that a correspondence had commenced and “the reverend, and I are tottering on the verge of an acquaintance”—even as she learned that the widower was engaged to marry for a second time.
Margaret had heard that Lydia Jackson, or “Lidian,” as Waldo insisted on renaming his fiancée, evoking the Greek “Lydian” musical scale and preventing the awkward elision of vowel sounds in “Lydia Emerson,” was a woman “of character and manners entirely unlike” Ellen Tucker Emerson, the child bride Waldo had married six years before, when she was eighteen and he twenty-six, and who had died of tuberculosis after only seventeen months of marriage. Lidian was a year older than Waldo, at thirty-three a woman of settled personality, unlikely to remind him of the pretty young poetess he still actively mourned. Despite his status as an engaged man, Waldo’s position as “reverend” allowed him a freedom in forming relationships with other women as counselor, confessor, or spiritual guide—even with an “unmarried woman of no mark or likelihood,” but with a fierce appetite for distinction, like Margaret. But could Margaret make a place for herself in the threesome of Waldo, Lidian, and the shade of Ellen?
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