Author

James Shirley(1596–1666)

James Shirley is documented in Fuller’s letters (1829). No work is named in the surviving passages, all in Letter to Unknown, and the most intensive engagement recorded is “analyzed”.

Engagement: AnalyzedReadMentioned
Present in: Letters
Documented: 1829

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 →

When Fuller engaged with James Shirley

I. Childhood

II. Adolescence1record

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.

Documentary evidence

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

1829—

Letter to Unknown

p159

analyzed · read

“I have had,—while staying a day or two in Boston,—some of Shirley's, Ford's, and Heywood's plays from the Athenaeum.”

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

Inferred Fuller explicitly names "Shirley's plays" borrowed from the Boston Athenaeum and comments on "noble strains of proud rage, and intellectual, but most poetical, all-absorbing, passion," though she does not specify which plays.

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

p149

analyzed · read

“I have had, — while staying a day or two in Boston, — some of Shirley's, Ford's, and Heywood's plays from the Athenaeum.”

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 Fuller expresses admiration for "noble strains of proud rage, and intellectual, but most poetical, all-absorbing, passion" found within these dramatic works, suggesting an active engagement with their literary and emotional content, though specific titles remain unnamed.