Carol Colclough Strickland

Henry James was seven years old when the brilliant Margaret Fuller died in a shipwreck. For years afterward, he referred to her as the Margaret-ghost and wondered if she would be surprised to learn that she was still being talked about in the 20th century. In this revelatory novel, she is no ghost, but near the center of a circle that included some of the most famous names in American literature. Not everyone in that circle approved of her and wanted to see her reputation flourish.
Fuller's life was a maelstrom of intensity and conviction. A brilliant conversationalist and prolific writer, she was America's first female newspaper columnist and war correspondent. After first shocking New England conservatives with her commitment to women's rights and revolutionary politics in Europe, she began an affair with an inappropriately young Italian soldier with whom she bore a child. Her tragic 1850 death in a shipwreck came as she was returning from her adventures in Italy.
Gathering in Concord, Massachusetts, her friends divided over how to ensure her legacy. "How can you describe a force?" Samuel Gray Ward asked. Did she leave anything more enduring than her reputation for brilliant conversation? The problem was that the manuscript her admirers considered her masterpiece went missing.  Was it mislaid in the confusion surrounding her death, or stolen and suppressed?
Her story is no longer lost, thanks to Sparks Fly Up: The Lost Story of Margaret Fuller.
As James Marcus proclaimed in a 2025 New Yorker review of two new nonfiction books, "It appears we are in the midst of a Margaret Fuller moment." In a crackling, character- and plot-driven story, this incendiary woman infuriates and inspires peers like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, and Herman Melville.