Margaret Fuller’s Reading Worlds

Author

ThucydidesInferred

Thucydides is documented in Fuller’s letters (1849). One work is named, all in Letter to Richard F. Fuller, and the most intensive engagement recorded is “read”.

Engagement
ReadMentioned
Present in
Letters
Documented
1849
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 Thucydides’s work in hand — an explicit statement of reading, sustained excerpting or translation, or a specific reading episode recorded by those who knew her.

  • undatedHistory of the Peloponnesian WarAttested

    “Thucydides couched in expressive style, but in its tissue of wars more like the annals of hornets than of men.”

    Recollections of Richard F. Fuller, Chapters Four-Six

    Continuation of the same explicit first-person reading account naming Thucydides among works read.

When Fuller engaged with Thucydides

I. Childhood
II. Adolescence
III. Self-Directed
IV. Transcendentalist
V. New York
VI. Europe1record
✦. Memoirs (1852)
1810
1820
1832
1836
1844
1846
1850

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

Thucydides in Fuller’s reading world

Documentary evidence

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

1849—

Letter to Richard F. Fuller

p213
read
“would be what the motto on my ring indicates "a possession forever for man.”

Fuller, Margaret. The Letters of Margaret Fuller. Edited by Robert N. Hudspeth. Vol. V. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988.

Inferred Fuller explicitly attributes a key phrase to "the motto on my ring"—"a possession forever for man"—and this is Thucydides' celebrated declaration from the History of the Peloponnesian War, Book I, chapter 22, where he distinguishes his serious historical work from mere performance by saying it is composed "as a possession for ever." Fuller's aspiration for her own history of the Italian revolution mirrors exactly Thucydides' aspiration for his account of the Peloponnesian War.