The New Student's Reference Work/Fuller, Sarah Margaret

Fuller, Sarah Margaret, Marchioness Ossoli, an American author, was born at Cambridgeport, Mass., May 23, 1810. After the death of her father, a lawyer and congressman, she supported herself for some time by teaching. Later on, in Boston, she edited The Dial. In 1844 she wrote Women in the Nineteenth Century, and in the same year, at the invitation of Horace Greeley, she went to New York and contributed articles to The Tribune, which were afterwards collected as Papers on Literature and Art. She afterwards went to Europe, and in 1847 met at Rome the Marquis Ossoli, to whom she was soon after married. She entered with enthusiasm into the struggle for Italian independence. In 1849, during the siege of Rome, she took charge of a hospital; and, on the capture of the city by the French, she and her husband and their child, after a period of hiding, set sail for America in 1850. The vessel was driven on Fire Island, near New York, by a violent gale in the early morning of July 16; the child's body was found on the beach; but nothing was ever seen afterward of Margaret Fuller or her husband. See Life by T. W. Higginson.