WorkClaude Adrien Helvétius

“Oeuvres complètes”

InferredFuller was reading Claude Adrien Helvétius, the freethinking Enlightenment philosopher, during her studies in 1825, likely from his collected Oeuvres complètes or his principal work De l'esprit.

ReadMentioned

Documented 1825

Letters

Selected engagements, in chronological order.

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 work is selective, not exhaustive. Methodology →

AttestedConfirmed reading1825Evidence ↓

Confirmed reading

Passages where the evidence goes beyond allusion to indicate that Fuller had this work in hand — an explicit statement of reading, sustained excerpting or translation, or a specific reading episode recorded by those who knew her.

Dated
1825Oeuvres completesAttested
“I devote to you the hours which Ariosto and Helvetius ask of my eyes”
Letters of Margaret Fuller ed. Hudspeth · Cambridge, it July 1825
Same sentence establishes Helvetius as a borrowed volume currently occupying her reading hours.

When Fuller engaged with this work

I. Childhood

II. Adolescence1record

III. Self-Directed

IV. Transcendentalist

V. New York

VI. Europe

✦. Memoirs (1852)

1810

1820

1832

1836

1844

1846

1850

1825—

Letter to Susan Prescott

p151

read

“I devote to you the hours which Ariosto and Helvetius ask of my eyes,—as, lying on my writing-desk, they put me in mind that they must return this week to their owner.”

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

Inferred Fuller was reading Claude Adrien Helvétius, the freethinking Enlightenment philosopher, during her studies in 1825, likely from his collected “Oeuvres complètes” or his principal work De l'esprit.