A Missing Witness to Fuller: Mickiewicz, Emerson, and the Woman Reformer

After Margaret Fuller’s tragic death in 1850, Ralph Waldo Emerson, together with William Henry Channing and James Freeman Clarke, co-edited the Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (1852). In a letter to the literary critic and historian Thomas Carlyle, Emerson hinted at the animating logic behind the Memoirs:  the building of a “cairn.”[1] This well-intentioned approach of Fuller’s grief-stricken friends, striving to create a respectable memorial, protective of Fuller’s reputation, was not without consequence.

The Memoirs paint a particular portrait of Fuller for posterity by condensing her letters (and those of her correspondents), smoothing the edges of Fuller’s life and person, and leaving out certain witnesses.[2] Among the many voices bearing witness to Fuller’s life in the Memoirs, one is conspicuously missing: Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855), one of Poland’s greatest poets, a religious revolutionary in exile in France, and, crucially for Transcendentalism’s own transatlantic story, an early conduit for Emerson’s influence in Europe. 

Mickiewicz was not a marginal figure in Fuller’s European life[3], nor an acquaintance Emerson could plausibly have overlooked. Fuller wrote to Emerson about Mickiewicz with much intensity and detail, and Emerson himself acknowledges him, albeit briefly, in their correspondence, referring to him as a “Polander.”[4] Mickiewicz’s ten original letters to Fuller are held in the Harvard archives, preserved because Fuller made careful copies and circulated them among friends. One of Mickiewicz’s lines to her hints at why she valued them so highly: “I encountered in you a true person.”[5]

In the early 1840s, Mickiewicz held the chair of Slavic languages and literatures at the Collège de France, where he lectured to packed rooms and frequently quoted from Emerson’s essays, including “Self-Reliance,” “Intellect,” “Over-Soul,” and “Man the Reformer.”[6] Later, in La Tribune des Peuples, of which he was the editor, Mickiewicz published his French translations of Emerson.

Fuller was a fulcrum in Transcendentalism’s history, both in New England and in its transatlantic reach. She promoted the circulation of Transcendentalism, first through its periodical, The Dial, which she edited for two years, and later, while in Europe, through personal connections and correspondence. In a letter dated March 15, 1847, she tells Emerson that she has sent his poems to Mickiewicz. Fuller promoted Emerson abroad and also tried to draw him into conversation with Mickiewicz. When she finally met Mickiewicz in Paris, in February 1847, Fuller recognized in him “the man I had long wished to see,” a rare balance of “intellect and passions… in due proportion,” with “a soul constantly inspiring.”[7] And similarly, Mickiewicz registered her as a whole presence: intellect and passion, beauty and spiritual authority, a figure with a prophetic charge. 

Fuller found in Mickiewicz a form of recognition she could not reliably receive in New England, and that even some of her closest friends could not offer. Consider Emerson’s “Man the Reformer.” In it, Emerson speaks of reformers in patently universalist terms—the same divine spark and moral capacity reside in every person, Emerson believed—but then imagines and addresses that reformer as male[8]. This mismatch echoes problems sometimes found in Emerson’s journals. In a striking entry, after a conversation with Fuller in March 1843 about women’s “state and duties,” and right before her planned publication of “The Great Lawsuit: Man vs. Men; Woman vs. Women,” Emerson writes that woman is “a docile daughter of God… endeavoring to hear the divine word and to convey it to me.”[9]

By then, in 1843, Emerson was the editor of The Dial and could have refused to publish Fuller’s essay. He did not, and in fact, he later commented, “I think the piece very proper & noble, and itself quite an important fact in the history of Woman. […] It will teach us to revise our habits on this head.”[10] And yet, his journal entry captures a telling tension. Alongside his public praise for Fuller’s advocacy, Emerson privately imagines women as passive mediums, conveying a divine message to men, not as independent agents carrying the universal divine spark and remaking the world in their own right.

Fuller applied Emerson’s theoretical imperative of the universal soul to her advocacy for equal rights in Woman in the Nineteenth Century. If the Over-Soul is a common ground of dignity, culture, and moral capacity, then women should not be treated as auxiliaries to men, but as self-determining agents with equal claims to education, work, public voice, and rights. Mickiewicz, too, took that imperative seriously, and he applied it to Fuller herself.

First came recognition: In his correspondence with Fuller, Mickiewicz notes, “I encountered in you a true person. […] Such an encounter on life’s journey consoles and fortifies.” He praises not her intellect or charm but her “sincerity and truth,” and imagines the time when women will claim those qualities as their standard: “What happiness it will be when all women recognize the merit of sincerity and truth.” He then reframes what counts as “beauty”: “The time is coming when inner beauty, inner spiritual life will become the first… quality of a woman.” And crucially, Mickiewicz urges Fuller to recognize herself, “to appreciate [herself] as a beauty.”[11]

Next came Mickiewicz’s call for incarnation and action. He presses Fuller not to “confine [her] life to books and reveries,” but to enact what she writes: “Live and act, as you write.”[12] Where before she “existed like a ghost that whispers to the living its plans and desires, no longer able to realize them itself,” the imperative now is that she incarnate her spirit in the world, according to Mickiewicz, not merely contemplating truth but realizing it.[13] Mickiewicz even reinforces his encouragement with a quote from Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ: scis haec omnia; beatus eris si feceris ea—you know these things; you will be blessed if you do them.[14]

Mickiewicz’s advice is also striking for how directly it names and understands embodiment—not simply as the enactment of ideas, but the whole person, mind and body. In his first letter to Fuller, he writes: “For you the first step of your deliverance and of the deliverance of your sex (of a certain class) is to know whether you are permitted to remain a virgin.”[15] A few months later, he borrows a line from Emerson’s “Give All to Love,” only to sharpen it and insist that “this love must not be that… of schoolboys and German Ladies.”[16] He encourages Fuller’s dual spiritual and sexual emancipation in language strikingly different from Emerson’s correspondence with her: “The relationships which suit you are those which develop and free your spirit, responding to the legitimate needs of your organism and leaving you free at all times.”[17]

Finally, Mickiewicz casts Fuller as a transatlantic mediator across “three worlds,” where the “point of support [of her spirit] is in the old world, her sphere of activity is in the new world; her peace in the world of the future.” [18] She is called upon to feel, to speak, and to act in each. Seeing Fuller as linked to the history of Poland, France, and America, Mickiewicz assigns her a historic mission: to “contribute to the deliverance of Polish, French and American womanhood.”[19] Mickiewicz refuses to narrow and contain Fuller’s potential. Rather, he sees her as decisively embodying “a presentiment of the world of the future.”[20]

For more than a century, Fuller’s story lived largely through the Memoirs and the canonical narrowing it produced. The full sentence Emerson wrote to Carlyle is revealing. “Without either beauty or genius… [she left] a kind of claim on our consciences to build her a cairn.”[21] In that line, Emerson withholds “beauty” and “genius” from Fuller and recasts her remembrance as a matter of ethical obligation, not recognition. Even when he grieves Fuller, he casts her in a receptive role, as an audience—“I have lost in her my audience,” he says in his journals—rather than as an agent with prophetic authority.[22]

Mickiewicz called a different Fuller into being, perhaps closer to how she would have hoped to be remembered and closer to the Transcendentalists’ universal soul, in full possession of its divine spark and reformist potential.

On a recent winter day, I stood before Fuller’s memorial at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It is a cenotaph, an empty tomb, since her remains were never recovered after the 1850 shipwreck off Fire Island. There is something eerie, and oddly fitting, about this emptiness: her body lost at sea, and her voice long adrift in a sea of partial narratives. Yet that void also beckons us to search, to bring more complete records into view, and to let her speak again.

Robert Hudspeth’s scholarly and faithful recovery of Fuller’s letters marked a turning point for Fuller studies, and most recently, following a whole generation of critical and biographical study, the new Library of America collection of Fuller’s writings from Brigitte Bailey, Noelle Baker, and Megan Marshall has helped to widen the record.[23] Her unpublished diaries, poetry, notebooks, and undated manuscripts promise new harmonies, and perhaps new dissonances, still to surface, voices that the first memorial—and nineteenth-century New England—could not hold.

Gosia Sklodowska is Executive Director of the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School and editor of Theosis, the Center’s annual publication. Her digital humanities research focuses on making primary sources more accessible for scholars and the broader public through open-access platforms, highlighting the mystical and theosophic works that influenced the American Transcendentalists and developing a public platform for the scholarly transcription of Margaret Fuller’s manuscripts from Harvard’s Houghton Library collections.

[1] Ralph Waldo Emerson to Thomas Carlyle, 28 July, 1851, CXLV in The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II., Retrieved from https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/13660/pg13660-images.html.

[2] “Sources” in Letters of Margaret Fuller: Volume I, 1845-1847, edited by Robert N. Hudspeth (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1987), 59-66.

[3] During her years in Europe (1846–1850), Fuller traveled first as a foreign correspondent for the New York Tribune and later became involved in political and social life in Italy.

[4] "I was heartily glad you saw Me. Sand and the Polander and heard the musical gods." R. W. Emerson. Letters vol. Ill p. 400., referenced in Leopold Wellisz, The Friendship of Margaret Fuller D’Ossoli and Adam Mickiewicz, Bulletin of the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in America , 1945-1946, Vol. 4 (1945-1946), 97.

[5] Adam Mickiewicz to Margaret Fuller, March 1847 in Friendship, 100.

[6] Edmund Ordon, “Mickiewicz and Emerson” in “Mickiewicz and the West: A Symposium”, Vol. 23, Issue 2, University of Bufalo Studies, 1956, 31-54.

[7] Margaret Fuller to Ralph Waldo Emerson, 15 March 1847, in Letters of Margaret Fuller: Volume IV, 1845-1847, edited by Robert N. Hudspeth (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1987),261.

[8] From Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Lecture, “Man the Reformer,” read before the Mechanics' Apprentices' Library Association, Boston, January 25, 1841. “Mr. President, and Gentlemen, I wish to offer to your consideration some thoughts on the particular and general relations of man as a reformer. I shall assume that the aim of each young man in this association is the very highest that belongs to a rational mind.”

[9] Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson: With Annotations, ed. Edward Waldo Emerson and Waldo Emerson Forbes, vol. 6 (1841–1844) (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1911), 369. Emerson’s journals are not consistent on this point, and elsewhere his writing reflects more nuanced and reciprocal formulations about women and men; but this entry captures the more conservative register that The Memoirs could reinforce.

[10] Charles Capper, Margaret Fuller: An American romantic life, Vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992),121.

[11] Mickiewicz to Fuller, March, 1847, in Friendship, 100.

[12] Ibid, 105.

[13] Ibid, 106.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Ibid, 95.

[16] Ibid, 106.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Ibid, 95.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Ibid.

[21] Emerson to Carlyle, 28 July, 1851, in The Correspondence.

[22] Emerson in journal entry. In Lawrence Rosenwald (Ed.), Ralph Waldo Emerson: Selected Journals 1841-1877 (NY: Library of America 2010), 512.

[23] Letters of Margaret Fuller: Volume I, 1845-1847, Edited by Robert N. Hudspeth (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1987). Fuller: Collected Writings, edited by Brigitte Bailey, Noelle A. Baker, and Megan Marshall (Library of America, 2025).