Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author to Speak at The House of the Seven Gables

Seven Lectures at Seven Gables

Megan Marshall

Author of “Margaret Fuller: A New American Life”

Wednesday, June 17, 2015

6 p.m.

Members free

Non-Members $7

For reservations, please email groups@7gables.org or call 978-744-0991, ext. 104

The House of the Seven Gables

Visitor Center

Please join us as we welcome distinguished author and scholar Megan Marshall. Her newest biography, “Margaret Fuller: A New American Life,” was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and it is cited for its evocative narrative style.

Marshall is also the author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist and award-winning book with notable local relevance — “The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism.”

Marshall’s highly anticipated presentation, part of the Seven Lectures at Seven Gables series, will be held at The House of the Seven Gables’ Visitor Center. Refreshments will be served. Reservations are recommended for this event scheduled for Wednesday, June 17, at 6 pm.

“Partial as biography can be, it is still the best tool for bringing a wealth of issues into play in one historical work,” writes Marshall. “Biography comes as close as any genre can to capturing the sense of what it felt like to be alive, in all the complexity that word suggests, at an earlier time.”

Marshall’s acclaimed biography of Margaret Fuller indeed captures the sense of what it felt to be alive for Fuller, who grew up in Cambridge, Mass. Fuller was a remarkable woman with a keen intellect, driving curiosity and refusal to accept the status quo that constrained women in the 19th century. Her work made an indelible mark.

Margaret Fuller, a subject of many past biographies, is nearly flesh and blood in Marshall’s book. We see Fuller in her enduring, spirited and challenging friendship with Ralph Waldo Emerson. We are shown her friendships with Oliver Wendell Holmes, Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Alcotts. She was one of Henry David Thoreau’s editors, she worked as a foreign correspondent and, while overseas, she fell in love and conceived a child out of wedlock. Among those she held in high esteem were George Sand and Mary Wollstonecraft — champions of women’s and children’s rights. She wrote “Women of the Nineteenth Century,” a book that resulted from a series of presentations for women. The dynamic arc of Fuller’s life plunges to tragedy when, at 40, she, her lover and her child drown on a ship returning to the United States from Italy. They are within sight of the shoreline of New York’s Fire Island when the accident occurs.

Marshall attended Bennington College and Harvard. She is also a poet, having studied with Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Robert Fitzgerald and Jane Shore. She lives in Massachusetts and teaches at Emerson College.

Photo Credit: House of the Seven Gables