The Life of Margaret Fuller

There are elements of Margaret Fuller's life that seem to belong to a story, and Madeleine Stern has taken advantage of that fact in her biography. Unlike more formal biographies, this one reads like a work of fiction. Stern used dialogue and description as if this were a novel. Nonetheless, the techniques she used are somewhat controversial, since they represent a recreation of events and thoughts that the author cannot really know. Although Stern indicated that all the details were known from either Fuller's journals or other sources, this is clearly not true when she described what other people were thinking and feeling. In this respect, her work does include invention.

From the very first page of the book, Stern used the technique of recreating the events of Margaret Fuller's life in great detail. She described the thoughts of Fuller's father, a conversation he had with Dr. Holmes, and his state of mind while he was waiting for Margaret to be born. While it is reasonable to suppose that Stern had access to all the available material about Fuller's life and times, it is not reasonable to believe that she could accurately reproduce all these conversations and internal dialogues. In other words, she made them up.

It all sounds plausible, however. Knowing what we know, and Stern knew, about Margaret Fuller and the other characters involved with her life, it is possible to imagine what they must have thoug

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words a foretelling of her death and the last view that any human being had of her. This is dramatic enough in itself. Success of Techniques Even though Stern used novelistic techniques, the biography is still not that easy to read. There seem to be several reasons for this. First, Stern has to include all the details of her subject's life, because that is more her purpose than telling a story. She wanted to set forth the life of Margaret Fuller. However, this takes away from the novelistic aspects of the book. Because biography is not generally the main purpose of a fictional novel, the author is allowed to select details, skipping years at a time, if necessary, and leaving out many of the events of the person's life. However, a biography that uses novelistic techniques is limited because it must include too many details to make it easy to read and enjoy as a story. A second problem is the language. While this is probably more faithful to Fuller's time, it sounds stiff and formal to the modern reader. It is stilted, and not colloquial English as it would be used today. This makes it read like historical fiction, which it is, to some extent. There are people who like that literary form, but others that do not. A

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