Margaret Fuller’s Reading Worlds

Author

John Russell(1787–1863)

John Russell is documented in Fuller’s letters and reading notebooks (1826–1828). One work is named, most often in Letter to Susan Prescott, and the most intensive engagement recorded is “excerpted”.

Engagement
ExcerptedAnalyzedQuotedReadMentioned
Present in
Letters · Notebooks
Documented
1826–1828

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 John Russell’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
  • 1828Tour in GermanyAttested

    “I have also read a most entertaining book, which I advise you to read...Russell's Tour in Germany.”

    Mem-2 Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli · Cambridge, Jan. 3, 1828

    Explicit 'I have also read a most entertaining book...Russell's Tour in Germany.'

In Fuller’s words

“At Dresden English is very generally cultivated among the well educated ranks … I have sometimes doubted whether German was not as phrasing a language as Italian … while the expressions awake so many feelings and associations, that the merely sensual claims of the ear are in a great measure disregarded." / Russell Tour in Germany”
A Tour in Germany · Reading Notebook 1825–1827 · 1826

When Fuller engaged with John Russell

I. Childhood
II. Adolescence2records
III. Self-Directed
IV. Transcendentalist
V. New York
VI. Europe
✦. Memoirs (1852)1record
1810
1820
1832
1836
1844
1846
1850

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

Russell in Fuller’s reading world

Documentary evidence

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

1826—

Reading Notebook 1825–1827

pp. 116–117
excerpted · analyzed · quoted · readSearch Digital Fuller (page unverified)
“At Dresden English is very generally cultivated among the well educated ranks … I have sometimes doubted whether German was not as phrasing a language as Italian … while the expressions awake so many feelings and associations, that the merely sensual claims of the ear are in a great measure disregarded." / Russell Tour in Germany”

Fuller, Margaret. "Reading Notebook 1825–1827." Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Attributed 'Russell Tour in Germany' immediately after the passage.

1828—

Letter to Susan Prescott

p155
analyzed · read
“I have also read a most entertaining book, which I advise you to read, (if you have not done so already,) Russell's Tour in Germany.”

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

Preserved in the Memoirs (1852)

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

1824—

Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli

p69
analyzed · read
“I have also read a most enter- taining book, which I advise you to read, (if you have not done so already,) Eussell's Tour in Ger- many.”

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