Margaret Fuller’s Reading Worlds

Author

Sappho(c. 630–c. 570 BCE)

Sappho is documented in Fuller’s books (1845). One work is named, all in Woman in the Nineteenth Century, and the most intensive engagement recorded is “analyzed”.

Engagement
AnalyzedReadMentioned
Present in
Books
Documented
1845
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 →

In Fuller’s words

“Sappho Eloisa / The names are of threadbare celebrity. [...] The youth here by my side cannot be weary of the fragments from the life of Sappho. He will not believe they are not addressed to himself [...] A recluse of high powers devotes himself to understand and explain the thought of Sappho — he asserts her vast superiority in soul and genius to her master”
Poems · Woman in the Nineteenth Century · 1845

When Fuller engaged with Sappho

I. Childhood
II. Adolescence
III. Self-Directed
IV. Transcendentalist
V. New York1record
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.

Sappho in Fuller’s reading world

Documentary evidence

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

1845—

Woman in the Nineteenth Century

source lines 2763–2765, 2781–2813
analyzed · read
“Sappho Eloisa / The names are of threadbare celebrity. [...] The youth here by my side cannot be weary of the fragments from the life of Sappho.”

Fuller, Margaret. Woman in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Greeley & McElrath, 1845.

Inferred Fuller names Sappho explicitly and at length, referring both to the fragments of her poetry (read by 'the youth here by my side') and to a 'recluse of high powers' who devotes himself to studying Sappho's thought. The passage also contains an oblique allusion to Abelard as the kind of understanding friend Sappho never had (contrasted with Sappho's actual 'master').