Margaret Fuller’s Reading Worlds

WorkKarl August Varnhagen von Ense; Rahel primary: Levin-Varnhagen

Rahel: Ein Buch des Andenkens für ihre Freunde [Rahel: A Book of Remembrance for Her Friends]

Rahel: Ein Buch des Andenkens für ihre Freunde [Rahel: A Book of Remembrance for Her Friends] (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1833) and related volumes (reviewed in Westminster Review vol. 32, 1839) Inferred

Karl August Varnhagen von Ense; Rahel primary: Levin-Varnhagen (1771–1833) · Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1833

InferredFuller encounters Rahel Levin Varnhagen through the Westminster Review's 1839 article reviewing posthumous volumes of her correspondence and writings, edited by her husband Karl August Varnhagen von Ense; as Hudspeth identified. She identifies with Rahel's famous maxim about being born only to live, and quotes the Westminster reviewer's characterization of Rahel's introspective mode as "feeling about feeling," recognizing in her a kindred intellectual spirit.

ExcerptedAnalyzedMentioned

Documented 1839

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 →

When Fuller engaged with this work

I. Childhood
II. Adolescence
III. Self-Directed
IV. Transcendentalist1record
V. New York
VI. Europe
✦. Memoirs (1852)
1810
1820
1832
1836
1844
1846
1850
1839—

Letter to Caroline Sturgis

p47
excerpted · analyzed
“In Rahel I think you may recognize well known lineaments.- Observe what she says (quoted by Goethe) about being born only to live; and what the Reviewer says of 'feeling about feeling.”

Fuller, Margaret. The Letters of Margaret Fuller. Edited by Robert N. Hudspeth. Vol. II. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984.

Inferred Fuller encounters Rahel Levin Varnhagen through the Westminster Review's 1839 article reviewing posthumous volumes of her correspondence and writings, edited by her husband Karl August Varnhagen von Ense; as Hudspeth identified. She identifies with Rahel's famous maxim about being born only to live, and quotes the Westminster reviewer's characterization of Rahel's introspective mode as "feeling about feeling," recognizing in her a kindred intellectual spirit.