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her favor. Some girls tried imitating Margaret’s half-shut eyes and habitual slouch, in the apparent belief that mimicking her mannerisms would enable them to “know as much Greek as she did.”When others observed her trick of converting her long hooded cloak for use as a satchel to carry home the armloads of books she borrowed at the local subscription library, hoisting them over her shoulder for the trek back to Dana Hill, they begged their mothers to buy them hooded cloaks so they might do the same.
    From her gang of adorers, Margaret chose particular favorites: Amelia Greenwood and Almira Penniman, Ellen Sturgis and Elizabeth Randall. “Each was to her a study,” wrote a close male friend of the time. He saw Margaret’s girl friends as a young man would: “There was A—a dark-haired, black-eyed beauty,” who was “bright” but “cold as a gem”; then “there was B—, the reverse of all this,—tender, susceptible, with soft blue eyes, and mouth of trembling sensibility.” C—was “all animated and radiant with joyful interest in life”; D—“half-voluptuous”; and E—“beautiful too, but in a calmer, purer style.”And then there was M—Margaret. She was their ringleader, too formidable and too physically awkward for a teenage boy to see with a would-be lover’s eyes.
    But Margaret too enjoyed the sensuality of girls her own age. The hours spent lounging on drawing room sofas after tea, on shady porches, or under parasols at summer visits to the seashore provided a respite from her schoolroom duties at home. The girls huddled in conversation, always conversation, for Margaret “never rested till she had found the bottom of every mind,—till she had satisfied herself of its capacity and currents,—measuring it with her sure line.”Margaret expected her friends to “be capable of seeking something.”She cared little what that something was, only that her friends “should not be satisfied with the common routine of life,—that they should aspire to something higher, better, holier, than they had now attained.”
    In many ways, Margaret wasn’t a girl at all anymore. In letters she addressed her teacher Susan Prescott as an intellectual equal and wrote to her of her childhood days as if they were many years in the past. When visiting friends, she often drifted away to speak with their mothers; two of her closest friends were accomplished adult women.
    Margaret most likely met the novelist Lydia Maria Francis in 1825 when Maria, who also preferred to use her middle name, was at the height of her early fame; at the reception for Lafayette, she had won a personal introduction and a kiss on the hand, which she vowed never to wash off, from the celebrated French general. Not long before that giddy moment, Maria Francis had published her first novel, Hobomok, the story of a romance between a Pequod Indian and a white woman, set in colonial New England, which “marked the very dawn of American imaginative literature,” in one critic’s estimation, and made Francis a celebrity overnight.
    Eight years older than Margaret, Maria Francis had been raised by an older sister in backwoods Maine after their mother’s early death. Self-taught, self-made, and self-reliant, she was unlike any woman Margaret had known before, yet they had a great deal in common. Maria too was filled with “restless insatiable ambition,” as she once wrote, which burned in her heart “like a fiery charm,” promising deliverance from obscurity.As with Margaret, the “harmless arrow” of Maria’s “playful wit” was often mistaken “for the poisoned darts of sarcasm,” and despite her celebrity status Maria soon earned “enemies as well as friends” in Boston society.The publication of her second novel, The Rebels, a thinly fictionalized account of a prominent Loyalist family in Revolutionary Boston, shocked and ultimately turned her public against her, once they decoded its source.
    Prophetically, Maria Francis