Author

Claude Adrien Helvétius(1715–1771)Inferred

Claude Adrien Helvétius is documented in Fuller’s letters and manuscripts (1825). 2 distinct works are named, most often in Letter to Susan Prescott, and the most intensive engagement recorded is “analyzed”.

Engagement: AnalyzedReadMentioned
Present in: Letters · Manuscripts
Documented: 1825

Additional passages preserved in the Memoirs (1852)

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 Claude Adrien Helvétius’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
1825Work not namedAttested
“the hours which Ariosto and Helvetius ask of my eyes, — as, lying on my writing desk, they put me in mind that they must return this week”
Mem-2 Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli · Cambridge, July 11, 1825
Same dated letter explicitly describing hours spent reading Helvetius.
1825Oeuvres completesAttested
“I devote to you the hours which Ariosto and Helvetius ask of my eyes”
Letters of Margaret Fuller ed. Hudspeth · Cambridge, it July 1825
Same sentence establishes Helvetius as a borrowed volume currently occupying her reading hours.

In Fuller’s words

“J’ai lu le livre si attendu de M. Helvetius. / Je suis effrayée par sa grosseur, — deux / volumes de six cents pages chacun; votre / voracité en viendrait à bout dans deux / jours; - mais moi - je ne saurais lire / avec intéret, mes affections retiennent toute / mon attention; je lis toujours ce que je sens, / et non pas ce que je vois. Eh, que l’esprit / s’amoindrit en aimant.”

De l'Homme, de ses Facultés intellectuelles et de son Éducation [On Man, His Intellectual Faculties and His Education] · Extracts Only

When Fuller engaged with Claude Adrien Helvétius

I. Childhood

II. Adolescence2records

III. Self-Directed

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.

Helvétius in Fuller’s reading world

Documentary evidence

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

1825—

Letter to Susan Prescott

p151

read

“I devote to you the hours which Ariosto and Helvetius ask of my eyes,—as, lying on my writing-desk, they put me in mind that they must return this week to their owner.”

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

Inferred Fuller was reading Claude Adrien Helvétius, the freethinking Enlightenment philosopher, during her studies in 1825, likely from his collected “Oeuvres complètes” or his principal work De l'esprit.

Undated

Pieces with no legible date. They are part of the record but cannot be placed on the lifeline.

n.d.—

Extracts Only

p46

analyzedManuscript page

“J’ai lu le livre si attendu de M. Helvetius.”

Fuller, Margaret. "Extracts Only." Houghton Library, Harvard University; bMS Am 1086 (88); Box 6 (88).

Inferred Lespinasse’s letter (transcribed by Fuller) mentions reading Helvétius’s new book in two volumes of 600 pages each; almost certainly De l’Homme (1772). Fuller transcribed Lespinasse’s letter describing reading ‘le livre si attendu de M. Helvétius’ in two volumes of 600 pages each.

Lespinasse’s letter (transcribed by Fuller) mentions reading Helvétius’s new book in two volumes of 600 pages each; almost certainly De l’Homme (1772). Fuller transcribed Lespinasse’s letter describing reading ‘le livre si attendu de M.

Preserved in the Memoirs (1852)

Passages surviving only in the posthumous Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, compiled by Emerson, Channing, and Clarke.

1852—

Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli

p63

read

“the hours which Ariosto and Helvetius ask of my eyes, — as, lying on my writing desk, they put me in mind that they must return this week to their owner.”

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, William Henry Channing, and James Freeman Clarke, eds. Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli. 2 vols. Boston: Phillips, Sampson and Company, 1852.

Inferred In this July 1825 entry, Fuller lists Claude Adrien Helvétius among the borrowed books residing on her writing desk. Given her father's philosophical leanings and the presence of prominent French Enlightenment writers in their library, the editors infer this refers to Helvétius's major philosophical work, De l'Esprit.