Finding Margaret Fuller in Concord: A Book Review

BY KRISTI LYNN MARTIN

Fiction is a fun introduction to history! Allison Pataki encourages her readers to visit Concord, where her novel is predominately set—to tour the Emerson House, The Old Manse, and Orchard House—as she did while writing. Indeed, shortly after Finding Margaret Fuller: a novel’s publication (Ballentine Books, 2024), book clubs scheduled group tours at Emerson’s home.

Pataki fictionalizes Fuller’s life and the characters in her circle, misshaping chronology into an anachronistic melange and altering history to suit the story she tells about a misfit woman and feminist model (particularly for future novelist Louisa May Alcott). Especially notable to readers familiar with Concord, fictional changes are historically misleading, opposing factual actions and sentiments of the real people Pataki’s characters are based on, yet raise figurative questions about women’s lives and gender equality.

While Pataki succeeds in popularizing Fuller, the first person narrative lacks emotional drive, compelling immediacy, and Fuller’s voice—her wit, spirit, and sheer intelligence. Her character is comparatively bland and tepid. Rather than a peer, Fuller is characterized as a subordinate protege to famous men and a rival to their oppressed wives, missing the mark in depicting her true relationships. Emerson is caricatured as a literary autocrat with a sullen, neglected wife; Thoreau, kindly feral woodsman; Bronson Alcott, idealist buffoon with a precocious heroine-to-be toddler; Sophia Hawthorne, weakened dependent bride to an imaginatively wayward husband. Pataki’s depictions are not without balancing sympathy, but the real story is more complex and interesting than fiction—replete with drama and romance for a novelist’s dreams. Pataki’s fiction invites readers to discover Concord’s true stories, to walk in Fuller’s footsteps in Sleepy Hollow’s pine shaded ridges and valleys or to Walden Pond; take in the surroundings on the rock at the Old Manse as Fuller did; go boating; and see Emerson’s home, where Fuller lived months of her life. After Finding Margaret Fuller at your local bookshop, let Concord’s tour guides tell you the true stories of this remarkable woman!

Dr. Kristi Lynn Martin is an independent interdisciplinary scholar specializing in Concord’s nineteenth-century literary circle. She has worked with Concord’s many literary-historic sites.