Even as she was publishing her first essays, circulating her translation of Tasso, and expanding her range of acquaintance, Margaret confessed to Henry Hedge a “restless desire to write stories . . . which have nothing to do with my present purpose.” Although she felt most secure in her critical powers, she did not yet value criticism as highly as fiction or poetry; perhaps she could adapt to fiction her talent for social observation and witty insights about the personalities in her circle. James Clarke’s sister, Sarah, had suggested she “write a novel and make myself a heroine.” Margaret thought Anna Barker would make a better protagonist. Probably a novel inspired by both characters—“the most gentle Anna and the most ungentle Margaret,” as she’d described their contrasting temperaments in a recent letter to James—would have been best.
But Margaret told none of her friends when she sent out a story—“Lost and Won”—to the New England Galaxy, where it appeared in print on August 8, 1835, her fourth publication in less than a year. She intended this one to go unnoticed: she’d taken as her subject the courtship of George Davis and Harriet Russell, spinning her story out of reports that, after the engagement, Harriet had “coquetted” with the rakish Cambridge bachelor Joseph Angier. The minor scandal fascinated Margaret, perhaps because it drew on the Goethean concept of elective affinities (the notion that sexual attractions sometimes defied convention yet must be obeyed) or because Margaret was secretly pleased to see the man she believed had jilted her pained by his fiancée’s public vacillation—or both. Yet before writing, she satisfied herself that Harriet had returned to proper form, and wrote up the incident as a morality tale illustrating the errant heroine’s restoration to virtue. Margaret portrayed her hero, modeled on George Davis, as having lost, and then regained, his fiancée in this ironically subtitled “tale of modern days and good society.”
All might have been well, had James Clarke not traveled home to New England in late summer, picked up a copy of the magazine, and recognized the thinly disguised lovers as George and Harriet—and himself as model for one of the more admirable male characters. As ever in sympathy with Margaret’s aims, he considered she had spun gold from the straw of his friends’ premarital spat. The story delivered its moral superbly, and he sent a copy to the newlyweds. He seemed to believe that the couple should be proud to serve as inspiration for Margaret’s tale. Instead George and Harriet were outraged, and Margaret turned on James for betraying her secret.
James’s sister, Sarah, attempted to intercede, but by then, in an episode that seemed to enlarge the frame of the story, Margaret had fallen sick with a severe headache and fever—typhoid fever, she said afterward. Her family called it brain fever and feared for Margaret’s life as she grew weaker, shaking with chills and suffering nightmare visions day after day. The fever did not break. Timothy offered a benediction: “My dear,” Margaret recalled him telling her one morning at her bedside, “I have been thinking of you in the night, and I cannot remember that you have any faults. You have defects, of course, as all mortals have, but I do not know that you have a single fault.” From Timothy, who considered compliments “hurtful to his children” and “who had scarce ever in my presence praised me,” the words of blessing sounded “strange,” but also moving. So accustomed was Margaret to her father’s criticism that she did not register the stinginess of his message: she had no faults. She heard, instead, a pronouncement of her perfection, which “affected me to tears.”
On the ninth day, her fever broke. Weak and chastened, Margaret survived the autumn. Timothy did not. In late September, almost as soon as his daughter was well, he collapsed one evening after a day spent in the fields, flushed with fever and retching uncontrollably. Eugene was in Virginia teaching, but when Timothy, directing even his last hours, announced he would surely die, the rest of the family, including William Henry, who had returned from the West Indies to a clerkship in Boston, gathered to say their farewells. After suffering two days of intensifying fever and chills accompanied by painful spasms, Timothy Fuller was dead of Asiatic cholera, contracted while working the lowland acres of his Groton farm. He was fifty-seven. At his bedside, Margaret reached out to close her father’s eyes.
8
“Returned into life”
TIMOTHY’S DEATH BROUGHT BACK FEELINGS MARGARET had experienced with the loss of her sister Julia Adelaide in childhood. Again her mother receded into grief, “worn to a shadow” with cares she could not face. Margaret felt like an “orphan” now. Summoning an “awful calm,” she gathered her siblings together around “the lifeless form of her father,” their mother later recalled, and “kneeling, pledged herself to God that if she had ever been ungrateful or unfilial to her father, she would atone for it by fidelity” to his children.
This was not simple mourning, and little wonder when Margaret was grieving a father whose scant blessing just days before his death had left her at once tearfully grateful and empty-handed. Margaret had been restored to health—“returned into life,” as she wrote to Almira Barlow—only to “bear a sorrow” the consequences of which she could scarcely fathom. She was consumed, for a time, with self-reproach. “My father’s image follows me constantly,” Margaret wrote in her journal of the weeks following his death. “Whenever I am in my room, he seems to open the door,” yet when Margaret looked up in hopes of receiving his “complacent, tender smile,” the empty room mocked her, reminding her of all the ways she had “fallen short of love and duty”: her ill-concealed resentment of the move to Groton, her refusal to visit the shaded seat Timothy had constructed for her in Margaret’s Grove.
Neither Eugene nor William Henry would return to oversee the farm. Surprising for a lawyer, Timothy had left no will, and stern Uncle Abraham, who had always handled family business in Timothy’s absence, stepped into the breach, informing Margaret and her mother that the estate was worth even less than expected. There was little cash on hand to support daily existence. Timothy’s investments had been in properties, primarily the Groton farm, which, for lack of a will, could not be sold until the estate was settled in court. Accustomed to deference and ill prepared to handle the family finances, Margarett Crane ceded her widow’s right to manage the estate to Abraham, who doled out funds, advanced against the eventual sale of Timothy’s properties, in the stingy manner Margaret and her mother had always chaffed under, insisting on accountings for everything from food and clothes to schoolbooks and fees for fifteen-year-old Ellen, who, Margaret argued, now needed the polish of a private school in Boston or Cambridge. It was time to let Ellen make the most of her good looks—an advantage that Margaret, despite her personal magnetism, did not possess.
“I have often had reason to regret being of the softer sex,” Margaret wrote to a friend, “and never more than now.” Where once she had “hated the din” of business affairs and “hoped to find a life-long refuge from them in the serene world of literature and the arts,” she found herself “full of desire” to learn “the management and value of property . . . that I may be able to advise and act.” Yet the fact remained: Margaret could never be “an eldest son,” a role that would have permitted her to serve as “guardian to my brothers and sister, administer the estate, and really become the head of my family.” Instead she was left to play mediator between her mother and Uncle Abraham, pleading with him to continue delivery of one newspaper, searching the attic of the Groton house for receipts to document Timothy’s holdings, apologizing for not having lent “a more heedful ear” to her father when he spoke of his financial concerns, and urging her uncle to “make things as easy to Mother as you can.” Margaret’s awareness that the childless Abraham Fuller was leading a life of plenty in his Cambridge mansion made this supplication all the more bitter. Still, he might one day make Timothy’s children his heirs, so she did her best to restrain her indignation.
James Clarke and George Davis both visited Groton to offer condolences. The ruckus over “Lost and Won” belonged to a distant past now, and Margaret was glad to receive the s
ympathy of the two most significant men in her life after Timothy—and then see them depart. The loss of her father and her sharp feelings of regret brought Margaret a deeper sense of isolation, but also of mission. She had long referred to the younger brothers she educated from childhood as “my boys.” Her father’s family was her family now. Resolved to honor this commitment, and in some ways freed by it from the restless uncertainty of recent years, Margaret found it possible finally to admit, in a letter to James after he’d left again for Kentucky, that she expected never to “become more tenderly attached to any other man,” even as she urged him to find another woman to love and marry.
James could not be her husband, but he had given her a vocation—first the nudge toward a writing career that she deflected but later embraced, then the means of publishing her first literary essays. Despite the anguish of the early autumn, she’d finished the review of Henry Taylor’s Philip van Artevelde, a historical drama in verse, that she’d promised to the Western Messenger over the summer. Experiencing a greater sense of mission in her writing too, she moved beyond biographical insight to articulate her own critical aesthetic. “Art is Nature, but nature, new modelled, condensed, and harmonized,” she wrote of Taylor’s play about a medieval governor’s call to power in place of his dead father—a plot that must have reverberated with her present circumstances, and she had always thrilled to tales from the feudal hall. “We are not merely like mirrors to reflect our own times to those more distant,” she explained. “The mind has a light of its own, and by it illumines what it recreates.” This statement of purpose, achieved at age twenty-five, would guide her writing hereafter; there would be no more fictional portrayals of her friends’ drawing room intrigues.
When the review appeared in December 1835, Margaret was already immersed in a more ambitious project, also bequeathed her by James but originating from her own mind’s light. The previous spring she had suggested to James that he “write a Life of Goethe in 2 vols . . . accompanied by criticisms of his works.” She confessed, “This vision swims often before mine own eyes,” but a biography was an enormous undertaking, and her imagination was already “swimming” with plenty of smaller, more manageable ideas; she would happily see this one “realized” by James. Yet her friend quickly divined that Margaret expected his prompting to make this project her own. “If I do it,” she had added, “there shall be less eloquence perhaps but more insight than a De Stael.” James delivered the needed stimulus: “I should like to see your ‘View of Goethe, 2 vols . . . Philadelphia, Carey Lea & Co.—’ Send me a copy of it, will you?” When Margaret mentioned the idea to Harriet Martineau in late summer, she received further encouragement. “She thinks the time is ripe, she thinks I can do it,” Margaret reported to James, asking him to lend her his set of Goethe’s works, forty volumes in German. She could not “at present, afford to buy them” herself.
Although she was attending to her father’s estate, negotiating on her mother’s behalf with Uncle Abraham, forming plans for her Goethe biography, continuing her family schoolroom duties, and taking on several adult pupils for foreign language study, Margaret would also remember the season following Timothy’s death as “the first winter of my suffering health.” She had not yet fully recovered from her own fever—sometimes she would say she never did—and though she had inherited Timothy’s tenacity, her mother’s example of retreating from overwhelming responsibility into illness was not lost on her. Migraine and back pain, the result of the spinal curvature that caused her slouching posture, plagued her when her spirits flagged.
Despite the dismal news about family finances, she had been reluctant to give up plans for the trip to Europe with the Farrars. How could she write Goethe’s biography without traveling to Germany and speaking to people who knew him? Staying home would mean having “to tear my heart, by a violent effort, from its present objects and natural desires.” Those objects and desires also included her passion for Anna Barker, with whom she’d begun to count on sharing this transformational journey.
During the fall, she wrote a series of six poems dedicated to Anna, whom she’d last seen in August at the height of her summertime confidence. After the shock of her father’s death, Margaret began to idealize Anna as her rescuer from despair, imagining the time they might spend together as if on “some isle far apart from the haunts of men.” In her journal she explained her attraction to women, in part, as the result of having “masculine traits,” and so “I am naturally often relieved by . . . women in my imaginary distresses.” But with Anna it was more than relief from anxiety Margaret dreamed of. As she wrote in another of the poems—“When with soft eyes, beaming the tenderest love, / I see thy dear face, Anna! Far above,— / By magnet drawn up to thee I seem.” Margaret was in love with Anna—perhaps a no more realistic love than her anguished passion for the standoffish George Davis—and her longing to have a share in Anna’s carefree existence, maybe the greatest share, was acute.
She worked out calculations. A two-thousand-dollar advance from her father’s estate—about the sum of her eventual portion—could finance the trip, she proposed, despite Uncle Abraham’s warning that the court might soon act to deprive her mother of household furnishings and livestock. At this critical time of need, could Margaret bring herself to leave the family she’d vowed to support in her miserly uncle’s care while she traveled to enhance her professional skills and ease her own distress—even if investing in her happiness and future success as a writer might help them all? The internal debate wore her down.
Sometimes she simply needed the cover of illness or exhaustion to regain her bearings. During the winter of her complicated grief and her indecision about Europe, she continued her investigations of Groton’s townsfolk, and volunteered one night to watch over a young woman dying of consumption—or so Margaret was told. Once she arrived at the house “full of poverty . . . and fragments of destiny,” Margaret learned from the young unmarried woman, perhaps Margaret’s own age, that she was pregnant and had attempted to abort the fetus: this act, not tuberculosis, brought on her lethal affliction. Margaret had entered a scene not just of poverty and illness, as she’d expected, but of a particular female desperation that was almost too horrifying to register. As at her father’s deathbed a few months earlier, Margaret experienced “a sadness of deepest calm.” She gathered into her arms this lonely woman, who had committed and was suffering for a “crime for the sake of sensual pleasure,” as Margaret saw it then; she sank back in Margaret’s embrace and died. How different this was from the death of Margaret’s small brother Edward in her arms several years before, or the death of Timothy: both son and father had been attended by loving if weary family members through their final hours.
Margaret reached home just before sunrise and, rather than seek out her mother, went straight to “the silent room” where “but late before my human father dwelt.” She lay down on her father’s bed—his deathbed—and watched “the cold rosy winter dawn and then the sun” cross the sky through the tall windows, refusing to eat, making this day “unintentionally a fast.” Lying there, Margaret began to take in the meaning of her future life, to assemble the fragments of her own destiny in the space left empty by her father and in reaction to that night’s scene of solitary female ruin.
Hers would have to be “an ascetic life.” She would renounce sensuality—the sort that had claimed a nameless single woman and her unborn child—and embrace winter’s “bareness, her pure shroud, her judgment-announcing wind.” She would summon from within herself the “strength to wait as a smooth bare tree forever.” It was time to give up the European journey, “to forget myself, and act for others’ sakes.” And she would “ask no more” of “my friends for leaves and flowers or a bird haunted bower”—she would get along without feminine care and affection, the metaphoric fruits of her mother’s garden, the sequestered isle she selfishly dreamed of inhabiting with Anna Barker.
At the day’s end she rose from Timothy’s bed and opened the door
into her family’s home to take his place. “I was called back to this state of things,” she wrote afterward to her old school friend Almira Barlow, “to perform some piece of work which another could not.” No one else could care for her family now as Margaret would; she became “a tower of strength in this emergency,” her brother Richard would recall. And perhaps her biography of Goethe, her own great work that, like her father’s projected history of the United States, honored a personal founding father, would one day be another “piece of work” that she could perform as no one else. She would practice patience—“wait as a smooth bare tree,” dedicated in spirit to her task, preparing as best she could on limited means—and hope the wait would not last “forever.”
But could she support her family while staying with them on the Groton farm? A second dark epiphany occurred in the spring. Again Margaret had gone on an errand of mercy—and of curiosity—to the house of impoverished neighbors, setting out by moonlight with a “happy sort of feeling” when “nature’s song of promise was chanting in my heart.” She’d visited this place before, a one-room farmhouse where a ninety-year-old widow, whose “husband, sons, strength, health, house and lands, all are gone,” lived on donations from townspeople, cared for by her unmarried daughter, an elderly woman herself. This time when Margaret entered the hut, where “everything is old and faded, but at the same time as clean and carefully mended as possible,” she found the two figures huddled before a low fire, despite the warm night air. In the dim light of the glowing embers, she saw the pair—“mother and daughter!”—as phantoms in a Platonic shadow play enacting a nightmarish destiny: they were “all frost” and had “long ceased to know what spring is.”
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