Book Review: ‘Bright Circle,’ by Randall Fuller

Both she and Lydia Emerson, who married Ralph Waldo, sustained their marriages by compromising their own intellectual talents. Lydia — a staunch abolitionist, committed to the rights of women and animals — came to consider Transcendentalism’s doctrine of self-sufficiency hypocritical, relying as it did on the domestic labor without which these men’s lives of peaceful contemplation would crumble.

The men play minor roles here — perhaps too minor, as it’s sometimes hard to see why these brilliant women found them so alluring. Emerson comes off particularly badly, practically plagiarizing his aunt Mary’s writings, and being shown up by his wife’s far more progressive stance on slavery.

By the early 20th century, Fuller writes, Transcendentalism’s legacy had solidified around its male practitioners, while the women were “reduced to caricatures who stood at the fringes.” Fuller’s avowedly revisionist account assumes a reader more familiar with the men’s work than the women’s.

But, arguably, this is no longer the case. For decades, feminist scholars have worked to reassert the women’s centrality to the movement: See Phyllis Cole’s pioneering work on Mary Moody Emerson, and Megan Marshall’s wonderful biographies of the Peabody sisters and Margaret Fuller (whose writings, in 2025, will receive a Library of America edition, nearly two centuries after she died in a shipwreck, along with the manuscript of her history of the Roman Revolution). The legacy-building was set in motion by Elizabeth Peabody herself, who doggedly transcribed the group’s conversations when Fuller worried that talk was too ephemeral to make a historical impact.

These strident, provocative, eccentric, determined women can no longer justly be left out of any narrative of this movement. Reading about their lives together — and, in particular, the pleasure they found in one another’s examples — makes for a stark indictment of the society that put obstacles in the way of their self-expression.

BRIGHT CIRCLE: Five Remarkable Women in the Age of Transcendentalism | By Randall Fuller | Oxford University Press | 405 pp. | $27.99