Life of Margaret Fuller

An original solo drama entitled Men, Women, and Margaret Fuller, performed and written by actor/author Laurie James.   Based on journals, letters, articles and books, the play brings to life our American foremother’s bold character and words. The one-woman show is sponsored by Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Redwood City and  will be staged at 2124 Brewster Ave, RWC   on February 25 at 7PM.  There is an admission fee of $10.00.  Born in 1810, Margaret Fuller's thoughts are as alive today as in the nineteenth century.  A woman of brains and heart, she was labeled genius by some, was ridiculed by others.  She was first to write a book for women’s equality, thereby laying the groundwork for the women’s rights movement in the United States.  She was one of America’s first literary critics, first editor of The Dial Magazine, first woman journalist on Horace Greeley’s New York Daily Tribune, first American foreign and war correspondent serving under combat conditions and, predating Florence Nightingale and Clara Barton, she served as director of an Italian hospital that treated the war wounded. 

                    The drama traces Margaret Fuller’s unusual childhood, her relationship with Ralph Waldo Emerson, her work with Horace Greeley, her travels, literary and Transcendentalist connections with Hawthorne, Thoreau, Poe and others, her reports of the Italian Revolution of 1848 and her friendship with Mazzini and Garibaldi as well as her marriage to an Italian nobleman, the birth of a son and her tragic drowning off the shores of Fire Island, New York in 1850.

                    Laurie James has toured in theatres, colleges, chautauquas, libraries, conference sites throughout the United States and many parts of the world.  Her major biography on Fuller won the non-fiction award from New York Foundation for the Arts.