Margaret Fuller’s Reading Worlds

Author

Elizabeth Palmer PeabodyInferred

Elizabeth Palmer Peabody is documented in Fuller’s letters (1838). One work is named, all in Letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the most intensive engagement recorded is “analyzed”.

Engagement
AnalyzedReadMentioned
Present in
Letters
Documented
1838
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 Elizabeth Palmer Peabody’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
  • 1838"Nature—A Prose Poem" (United States Magazine and Democratic Review)Attested

    “Lately I have been amusing myself with looking at you through two pair of spectacles of very dissimilar construction in Brownson's review and the Democratic.”

    Letters of Margaret Fuller ed. Hudspeth · Providence 1st March 1838

    Continuation of the same sentence documenting her reading of the Democratic Review piece. Identification note (Oct 12, 2026): the excerpt establishes that Fuller read two periodical presentations of Peabody — 'two pair of spectacles… in Brownson's review and the Democratic.' The identification of the Democratic Review item as Peabody's 'Nature—A Prose Poem,' and its attribution to Peabody, are provisional and not argued from the excerpt.

In Fuller’s words

“I have been amusing myself with looking at you through two pair of spectacles of very dissimilar construction in Brownson's review and the Democratic.”
"Nature — A Prose Poem" [review of Emerson's Nature], United States Magazine and Democratic Review, vol. 1: 319–29 · Letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson · 1838

When Fuller engaged with Elizabeth Palmer Peabody

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.

Peabody in Fuller’s reading world

Documentary evidence

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

1838—

Letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson

p328
analyzed · read
“I have been amusing myself with looking at you through two pair of spectacles of very dissimilar construction in Brownson's review and the Democratic.”

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

Inferred Hudspeth identified the specific review as "Nature—A Prose Poem" (United States Magazine and Democratic Review 1, February 1838), conclusively attributed by Margaret Neussendorfer to Elizabeth Peabody.