If our imagination is challenged to picture what Margaret Fuller would have been like had she remained in Boston, it is positively staggered at trying to conceive what would have been the career of the Marchioness Ossoli in America. The wreck of the Elizabeth deprived the cultural history of this country of what would surely have been an exciting chapter.

Margaret had done her strenuous work under fire while her husband stood in daily peril of death and while she herself was cut off from all communication with h…

Her specter haunted all who knew her, and many who did not. Henry James, born in New York in 1843, stood beside his father on a Hudson River excursion boat and…

The only woman to whom it has been given to touch what is decisive in the present world and to have a presentiment of the world of the future.

If they had said that the sun or the moon had gone out of the heavens, it could not have struck me with the idea of a more awful and dreary blank in creation t…

Torn from their destined page (unworthy meed Of knightly counsel and heroic deed).

The nineteenth century will colonize; so, in its fantasies, did the nineteenth century soul. When Emma [Bovary] turns spendthrift and buys curtains, carpets an…