Margaret Fuller’s Reading Worlds

Author

Joseph Marie de Gérando(1772–1842)

Joseph Marie de Gérando is documented in Fuller’s letters (1837). One work is named, all in Letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the most intensive engagement recorded is “read”.

Engagement
ReadMentioned
Present in
Letters
Documented
1837
Totals count documented engagements, once at the earliest witness. How we count →

Reprints, Memoirs passages, and repeat notes within a single manuscript are shown but never counted twice. Evidence for this author is selective, not exhaustive. Methodology →

Confirmed reading

Passages where the evidence goes beyond allusion to indicate that Fuller had Joseph Marie de Gérando’s work in hand — an explicit statement of reading, sustained excerpting or translation, or a specific reading episode recorded by those who knew her.

  • Dated
  • 1837Work not namedPossible

    “I have now of yours two vols of Milton, one of Jonson, one of Plutarch's Morals, two of Degerando, with the 7th and 8th of Goethe's nachgelassene Werke”

    Letters of Margaret Fuller ed. Hudspeth · 30 May 1837

    Possible: two volumes of Degérando she asks to keep for the summer; possession, not a reading statement. Fuller to Ralph Waldo Emerson; provenance per Harvey's extraction: letter to Emerson, printed in Higginson, Margaret Fuller Ossoli (1884).

In Fuller’s words

“I have now of yours two vols of Milton, one of Jonson, one of Plutarch's Morals, two of Degerando, with the 7th and 8th of Goethe's nachgelassene Werke.”
Histoire comparée des systèmes de philosophie [Comparative History of Philosophical Systems] · Letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson · 1837

When Fuller engaged with Joseph Marie de Gérando

I. Childhood
II. Adolescence
III. Self-Directed
IV. Transcendentalist1record
V. New York
VI. Europe
✦. Memoirs (1852)
1810
1820
1832
1836
1844
1846
1850

This page brings together documented engagements currently identified within the Fuller Reading Worlds catalog.

Gérando in Fuller’s reading world

Documentary evidence

Selected passages from Fuller’s own writings, in chronological order.

1837—

Letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson

p276
read
“I have now of yours two vols of Milton, one of Jonson, one of Plutarch's Morals, two of Degerando, with the 7th and 8th of Goethe's nachgelassene Werke.”

Fuller, Margaret. The Letters of Margaret Fuller. Edited by Robert N. Hudspeth. Vol. I. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983.

Inferred Fuller borrows two volumes of Degerando from Emerson, identified by Hudspeth as Joseph Marie de Gérando's Histoire comparée des systèmes de philosophie (Paris, 1822–23), a comparative history of philosophical systems.