her future prospects and those of a similarly talented, nobly ambitious boy. Was it “possible to a female” to wield power? And if so, how?
Contemplating the heroic example of the Greeks in an essay written for her father was one thing: They can conquer who believe they can. She could imagine herself into that earlier world as, perhaps, an Amazonian warrior, or even as a member of Aeneas’s crew. Margaret’s mind could take her anywhere; she delighted, she wrote to her teacher Susan Prescott, in being “translate[d]” through her reading or in daydreams to “another scene,” where she became absorbed, “to tears and shuddering,” by the “spirit of adventure.” Most recently she had become immersed in the novel Anastasius, which “hurls you,” alongside its protagonist, “into the midst of the burning passions of the East.”But at a formal social occasion for a living hero of her own day, the ritualized behavior and dress—the stark differences between dark-suited men and puffy-sleeved, corseted women as they sat at table, gathered after dinner in separate rooms—must have seemed incontrovertible evidence of feminine constraint. Was there “pleasure” to be had in Lafayette’s company that night for a girl like Margaret, who wished herself—willed herself—onto the avenues of glory with the likes of her hero?
The following year, in support of Timothy’s ambitions for himself and for Margaret—could they be separated?—the Fullers moved into the former home of Chief Justice Francis Dana, giving up their drab Cambridgeport house for a grand Georgian residence perched on a terraced hillside in Old Cambridge, a quarter of a mile east of the Harvard campus. With a private drive leading up from the road to Boston across spacious lawns dotted with specimen fruit trees, the Dana mansion offered an expansive view over the Charles River, “so slow and mild,” Margaret wrote. From her second-story window she could see all the way to the “gentle” Blue Hills of Dedham in the south and to Mount Auburn in the west, which glowed in the late-afternoon sun beyond the slate rooftops of Harvard’s handful of classroom and dormitory buildings.The prospect was far superior to the Cambridgeport soap works, which her four-year-old brother Arthur, lording it over the two younger Fuller boys, Richard and the new baby, Lloyd, in the nursery at Dana Hill, mischievously claimed to miss.
But the greater luxury only highlighted Margaret’s increasingly ambiguous position in the family as she neared adulthood. What was she to do with her prodigious learning and restless ambition? At sixteen, she was now the eldest of seven Fuller siblings, with the cherubic six-year-old Ellen her only sister. Had she been a boy, Margaret would have begun classes at Harvard. Instead she was required to start the little ones on their first lessons and hear daily recitations from Eugene and William Henry, ages eleven and nine, while pursuing an ambitious self-imposed curriculum of her own devising. Most days she made time for Greek and Italian language study, French philosophy and literature, and piano practice—all preparation for an only dimly foreseeable future in which marriage was the sole achievement expected of her, but the last thing on her mind. No wonder she allowed the rosy sunset over Mount Auburn to draw her attention away from Harvard’s imposing brick and stone campus: she could never walk those avenues of glory as a scholar or, as might one day have been appropriate to her talents, professor.
Timothy Fuller had quit representing the Middlesex district of Massachusetts in the U.S. Congress, where he’d never gained influence, and turned to state politics, swiftly becoming speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives. His law practice, which thrived now that he was in residence year-round, paid the bills for the Dana estate. But Timothy wanted more: a diplomatic posting to Europe under the new administration of
Contemplating the heroic example of the Greeks in an essay written for her father was one thing: They can conquer who believe they can. She could imagine herself into that earlier world as, perhaps, an Amazonian warrior, or even as a member of Aeneas’s crew. Margaret’s mind could take her anywhere; she delighted, she wrote to her teacher Susan Prescott, in being “translate[d]” through her reading or in daydreams to “another scene,” where she became absorbed, “to tears and shuddering,” by the “spirit of adventure.” Most recently she had become immersed in the novel Anastasius, which “hurls you,” alongside its protagonist, “into the midst of the burning passions of the East.”But at a formal social occasion for a living hero of her own day, the ritualized behavior and dress—the stark differences between dark-suited men and puffy-sleeved, corseted women as they sat at table, gathered after dinner in separate rooms—must have seemed incontrovertible evidence of feminine constraint. Was there “pleasure” to be had in Lafayette’s company that night for a girl like Margaret, who wished herself—willed herself—onto the avenues of glory with the likes of her hero?
The following year, in support of Timothy’s ambitions for himself and for Margaret—could they be separated?—the Fullers moved into the former home of Chief Justice Francis Dana, giving up their drab Cambridgeport house for a grand Georgian residence perched on a terraced hillside in Old Cambridge, a quarter of a mile east of the Harvard campus. With a private drive leading up from the road to Boston across spacious lawns dotted with specimen fruit trees, the Dana mansion offered an expansive view over the Charles River, “so slow and mild,” Margaret wrote. From her second-story window she could see all the way to the “gentle” Blue Hills of Dedham in the south and to Mount Auburn in the west, which glowed in the late-afternoon sun beyond the slate rooftops of Harvard’s handful of classroom and dormitory buildings.The prospect was far superior to the Cambridgeport soap works, which her four-year-old brother Arthur, lording it over the two younger Fuller boys, Richard and the new baby, Lloyd, in the nursery at Dana Hill, mischievously claimed to miss.
But the greater luxury only highlighted Margaret’s increasingly ambiguous position in the family as she neared adulthood. What was she to do with her prodigious learning and restless ambition? At sixteen, she was now the eldest of seven Fuller siblings, with the cherubic six-year-old Ellen her only sister. Had she been a boy, Margaret would have begun classes at Harvard. Instead she was required to start the little ones on their first lessons and hear daily recitations from Eugene and William Henry, ages eleven and nine, while pursuing an ambitious self-imposed curriculum of her own devising. Most days she made time for Greek and Italian language study, French philosophy and literature, and piano practice—all preparation for an only dimly foreseeable future in which marriage was the sole achievement expected of her, but the last thing on her mind. No wonder she allowed the rosy sunset over Mount Auburn to draw her attention away from Harvard’s imposing brick and stone campus: she could never walk those avenues of glory as a scholar or, as might one day have been appropriate to her talents, professor.
Timothy Fuller had quit representing the Middlesex district of Massachusetts in the U.S. Congress, where he’d never gained influence, and turned to state politics, swiftly becoming speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives. His law practice, which thrived now that he was in residence year-round, paid the bills for the Dana estate. But Timothy wanted more: a diplomatic posting to Europe under the new administration of
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