Read Online Margaret Fuller by Megan Marshall - Free Book Online Page A

John Quincy Adams. And he encouraged Margaret to expect a Continental finish to her education.
    Scarcely a month after the move from Cambridgeport, Timothy used the Dana house to press his case, hosting a lavish dinner dance in the president’s honor. The event promised to be the first Fuller social success, erasing the memory of Margaret’s failed midwinter ball several years earlier, and even afterward it was said to have been “one of the most elaborate affairs of the kind” since pre-Revolutionary days.But Timothy too was forced to count his extravaganza a failure. Adams, still mourning the death of his father, the first President Adams, two months earlier, left before the dancing began and never did offer Timothy Fuller a place in his diplomatic corps. The gala came to seem another case of ill-advised merriment; there would be no more balls in the capacious Fuller home.
    If Timothy had hoped his older daughter would display herself as an appealing commodity on the marriage market that night, he was disappointed in this also. At least one young woman present found Margaret unchanged from the days of her catastrophic dancing party, describing her at the Adams ball as “a young girl of sixteen with a very plain face, half-shut eyes, and hair curled all over her head.” Margaret had laced herself too tightly, “by reason of stoutness,” and she wore “a badly cut, low-necked pink silk, with white muslin over it.” Her dancing was awkward too, the result of being “so near-sighted that she could hardly see her partner.”
    Margaret was still a precocious half-child half-adult, and anyone who chose to evaluate her in these days solely on the basis of manners and appearance was sure to find her lacking. She had not bothered to notice that the fashion for a full head of curls had given way to a mere fringe of ringlets around the face; her heavy honey-colored hair was difficult to manage anyway, even if it was her one point of pride. She had done her best job of corseting to show off her waist, but hers wasn’t thin. Daring others to overlook her ungainly posture and ill-fitting clothes if they wished to know her, Margaret wasn’t yet ready to admit that her appearance should matter. She longed not for Boston’s elegant ballrooms but, as she wrote to Susan Prescott, for the ancient “feudal hall” where an assembled company might fall under “the romance of the minstrel” rather than the sway of a politician, and would venerate “nature, not as high-dressed and pampered, but as just risen from the bath.”Words, not looks, were her stock in trade, but it remained to be seen what reward they would bring.
    Fortunately there were many now who were drawn to Margaret’s way of speaking and to her bookish, passionate nature. Despite Harvard’s inaccessibility to women, the intellectual atmosphere of Old Cambridge was congenial to members of both sexes. “There is a constant stimulus to improvement,” one female contemporary wrote of Cambridge in the 1820s, and “even if you know today more than some others they may sit up all night and put you down tomorrow.”A “born leader” who was capable of directing parlor games with a wave of a handkerchief, and always ahead of the rest in her studies, Margaret could hold her listeners in thrall.“How did she glorify life to all!” one friend recalled, inspired like many to superlatives when it came to describing Margaret’s talk: “all that was tame and common vanish[ed] away in the picturesque light thrown over the most familiar things by her rapid fancy, her brilliant wit, her sharp insight, her creative imagination, by the inexhaustible resources of her knowledge.”
    While Margaret’s “sarcastic, supercilious” teasing, her “inclination to quiz,”and her obvious disdain for “mediocrity”still made enemies of those who felt the heat of her scorn (her critic at the Adams ball may have been one of these), she began to have admirers who plotted to gain