“To Eat This Big Universe as Her Oyster”: Margaret Fuller and the First Major Work of American Feminism

By Randall Fuller

“As a nature to grow, as an intellect to discern, as a soul to live freely and unimpeded” — this is the kind of life envisioned by Margaret Fuller in Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845). With an ear attuned to the transcendentalist’s inimitable voice, Randall Fuller revisits the intellectual context, interviews with female prison inmates, and personal longing that informed this landmark feminist work. more

“You Think Me a Bold Cheat”: Mary Carleton, Counterfeit Princess

By Laura Kolb

Accused of posing as foreign royalty to lure her young suitor into a bigamous marriage, Mary Carleton was the subject of dozens of pamphlets and broadsides published in the mid-17th century, including by Carleton herself. Investigating the fraudster’s life, Laura Kolb finds a self-fashioning figure who both influenced the emergence of the English novel and serves as a strange precursor to our modern-day fascination with conwomen and counterfeits, like the heiress manqué Anna Delvey. more