Margaret Fuller’s Reading Worlds

Author

Theodore Sedgwick Fay(1807–1898)Inferred

Theodore Sedgwick Fay is documented in Fuller’s letters (1833). One work is named, all in Letter to James F. Clarke, and the most intensive engagement recorded is “analyzed”.

Engagement
AnalyzedReadMentioned
Present in
Letters
Documented
1833
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 Theodore Sedgwick Fay’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
  • 1833Sketch of the Life of John Howard PayneAttested

    “This aftn I have been reading a memoir of J. H. Payne Poor fellow!”

    Letters of Margaret Fuller ed. Hudspeth · Groton 3oth August 1833

    "I have been reading a memoir of J. H. Payne" is an explicit reading statement.

In Fuller’s words

“This aftn I have been reading a memoir of J. H. Payne Poor fellow!- All biographies (Scott's, Goethe's, Korner's, Madame Roland's and some dozens more excepted) make me sick at heart and make it hard to realize that there is a Heaven.”
Sketch of the Life of John Howard Payne · Letter to James F. Clarke · 1833

When Fuller engaged with Theodore Sedgwick Fay

I. Childhood
II. Adolescence
III. Self-Directed1record
IV. Transcendentalist
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.

Fay in Fuller’s reading world

Documentary evidence

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

1833—

Letter to James F. Clarke

p216
analyzed · read
“This aftn I have been reading a memoir of J. H.”

Fuller, Margaret. The Letters of Margaret Fuller. Edited by Robert N. Hudspeth. Vol. VI. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988.

Inferred Hudspeth identified this as Theodore Sedgwick Fay's Sketch of the Life of John Howard Payne (Boston, 1833), and Fuller's response is emotionally engaged: she mourns John Howard Payne's story of 'such a brilliant dawn and such a gray afterday of baffled efforts.' Catalogue note: a standalone essay or article rather than a book; retained under the author's record but excluded from the book titles list.