Margaret Fuller

A New American Life

De: Megan Marshall

Narrado por: Cynthia Barrett

Pulitzer Prize, Biography, 2014

From an early age, Margaret Fuller provoked and dazzled New England’s intellectual elite. Her famous Conversations changed women’s sense of how they could think and live; her editorship of the Transcendentalist literary journal the Dial shaped American Romanticism. Now, Megan Marshall, whose acclaimed The Peabody Sisters "discovered" three fascinating women, has done it again: No biography of Fuller has made her ideas so alive or her life so moving. Marshall tells the story of how Fuller, tired of Boston, accepted Horace Greeley’s offer to be the New-York Tribune’s front-page columnist. The move unleashed a crusading concern for the urban poor and the plight of prostitutes, and a late-in-life hunger for passionate experience. In Italy as a foreign correspondent, Fuller took a secret lover, a young officer in the Roman Guard; she wrote dispatches on the brutal 1849 Siege of Rome; and she gave birth to a son. Yet, when all three died in a shipwreck off Fire Island shortly after Fuller’s 40th birthday, the sense and passion of her life’s work were eclipsed by tragedy and scandal. Marshall’s inspired account brings an American heroine back to indelible life.

©2013 Margaret Fuller (P)2014 Audible, Inc.

Reseñas de la Crítica

• Earphones Award, 2014

"Cynthia Barrett's witty, intelligent narration enlivens Marshall's 2014 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Margaret Fuller.... Barrett brings humanity to Marshall's impeccable research, introducing an extraordinary woman whose life was shaped by her struggle for gender equality and touched by joy, scandal, and tragedy." (AudioFile)

loved it

highly recommend! I really admire and relate to Margaret even more now. her life abroad is fascinating.

A masterpiece of a biography

Megan Marshall's ability to weave such an evocative story out of the minute detail she gathered from her research is exquisite. Though of course this is the story of a feminist and a revolutionary for 19th century Republican ideals, it is also the story of a human being trying to find personal happiness in relationship and, ultimately, figure out how society could be structured differently to allow for happy relationships. Thank you for bringing us Margaret Fuller, who has as much to offer our generation as she did her own.

A Remarkable Woman in the Nineteenth Century

The perfect match of biographer and subject; the life of a daunting figure told with sympathetic understanding and more than a little poetry. The reading aloud is admirable and carries the listener through a complicated story with many characters although the narrative is refreshingly concise for a modern biography.

It’s worth it

Reviewers are harsh on Barrett’s performance of Marshall’s excellently researched biography. To me it captured a voice of a literary conversation circle—so snooty to some but polished and confident in the way I have come to imagine Margaret Fuller’s voice and compelling mind. I absolutely loved the deep dive into the literary elite and see Margaret Fuller’s position within it.

A remarkable woman

Margaret Fuller is nothing short of amazing. Her story is inspiring, painful, and immensely powerful. She should be a household name in America. Her legacy is beyond words.

good and insufferable

Meticulously researched and a fascinating glimpse into the life and mind of Margaret fuller and some of early America's most brilliant thinkers ( and the relationships between them), I learned much from this book, and felt transported to another era. However, I found the narrator's voice quite irritating, and it detracted greatly from my enjoyment of the book. For lack of a better word, the whole thing was read with a monotone kind of "snootiness", an annoying affect that made the book almost insufferable to get thru. Unfortunately I think the narrator colored greatly my perception of the book and Margaret Fuller. I found it much more enjoyable once I read the actual book myself.

Exhaustive

Meticulously researched and tedious. Narrator is annoying. Started out interesting then devolved into endless detail with little action.

Had to stop listening

Would you try another book from Megan Marshall and/or Cynthia Barrett?

Yes for Marshall, no for Barrett

If you’ve listened to books by Megan Marshall before, how does this one compare?

I have not.

How did the narrator detract from the book?

Everything. I had to stop listening because her narration was driving me crazy. She over-enunciated, had little variety in her tone, and frequently mispronounced words or incorrectly inflected phrases, so much so that it threw me out of the story.

Rich portrait of an extraordinary woman

Marshall’s biography is a a detailed portrayal of Margaret Fuller. It opened up for me the intellectual richness and courage of Fuller. I especially enjoyed the section on the Roman Revolution. Much of what she had to say is quoted by Christopher Clark in his magisterial history of 1848.
The reader’s mispronunciation of foreign words was jarring.

Good narration is critical

What could have made this a 4 or 5-star listening experience for you?

The narrator had a predictable rising and falling sing song quality to her voice whether the subject was studies or heartbreak/

Would you be willing to try another one of Cynthia Barrett’s performances?

Not any time soon.

If you could play editor, what scene or scenes would you have cut from Margaret Fuller?

The content was interesting, just had to stop listening.