Background
Marshall was born in Oakland, California. Her mother was a book designer. Her father worked in city government.
( Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography "Thoroughly...)
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography "Thoroughly absorbing, lively . . . Fuller, so misunderstood in life, richly deserves the nuanced, compassionate portrait Marshall paints." — Boston Globe Pulitzer Prize winner Megan Marshall recounts the trailblazing life of Margaret Fuller: Thoreau’s first editor, Emerson’s close friend, daring war correspondent, tragic heroine. After her untimely death in a shipwreck off Fire Island, the sense and passion of her life’s work were eclipsed by scandal. Marshall’s inspired narrative brings her back to indelible life. Whether detailing her front-page New-York Tribune editorials against poor conditions in the city’s prisons and mental hospitals, or illuminating her late-in-life hunger for passionate experience—including a secret affair with a young officer in the Roman Guard—Marshall’s biography gives the most thorough and compassionate view of an extraordinary woman. No biography of Fuller has made her ideas so alive or her life so moving. “Megan Marshall’s brilliant Margaret Fuller brings us as close as we are ever likely to get to this astonishing creature. She rushes out at us from her nineteenth century, always several steps ahead, inspiring, heartbreaking, magnificent.” — Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, author of Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity "Shaping her narrative like a novel, Marshall brings the reader as close as possible to Fuller’s inner life and conveys the inspirational power she has achieved for several generations of women." — New Republic
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/054424561X/?tag=2022091-20
( Elizabeth, Mary, and Sophia Peabody were in many ways ...)
Elizabeth, Mary, and Sophia Peabody were in many ways our American Brontes. The story of these remarkable sisters — and their central role in shaping the thinking of their day — has never before been fully told. Twenty years in the making, Megan Marshall's monumental biograpy brings the era of creative ferment known as American Romanticism to new life. Elizabeth, the oldest sister, was a mind-on-fire thinker. A powerful influence on the great writers of the era — Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau among them — she also published some of their earliest works. It was Elizabeth who prodded these newly minted Transcendentalists away from Emerson's individualism and toward a greater connection to others. Mary was a determined and passionate reformer who finally found her soul mate in the great educator Horace Mann. The frail Sophia was a painter who won the admiration of the preeminent society artists of the day. She married Nathaniel Hawthorne — but not before Hawthorne threw the delicate dynamics among the sisters into disarray. Marshall focuses on the moment when the Peabody sisters made their indelible mark on history. Her unprecedented research into these lives uncovered thousands of letters never read before as well as other previously unmined original sources. The Peabody Sisters casts new light on a legendary American era. Its publication is destined to become an event in American biography. This book is highly recommended for students and reading groups interested in American history, American literature, and women's studies. It is a wonderful look into 19th-century life.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0618711694/?tag=2022091-20
Marshall was born in Oakland, California. Her mother was a book designer. Her father worked in city government.
Marshall came East to attend Bennington College as a literature and music major, but left without finishing and later enrolled at Harvard College, where she studied with poets Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Fitzgerald, and Jane Shore.
Her second biography Margaret Fuller: A New American Life (2013) is a richly detailed account of Margaret Fuller, the 19th-century author, journalist, and women's rights advocate who perished in a shipwreck off New York’s Fire Island. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in 1977 and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Before turning to writing, Marshall worked in the publishing industry and taught.
Her first book, published in 1984, was The Cost of Loving: Women and the New Fear of Intimacy, which examines the impact of the feminist movement on its followers.
Marshall is particularly interested in uncovering and exploring the lives of women who have been forgotten by traditional historians and biographers. Supported by grants and teaching, she worked on the book The Peabody Sisters for nearly 20 years, reading original letters and documents as well as delving into the newspapers and literature of the era.
The book focused on the lives of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Mary Tyler Peabody Mann, and Sophia Hawthorne. Her second biography is Margaret Fuller: A New American Life.
In a conversation in Radcliffe Magazine with author Margot Livesey, Marshall spoke about the connection between the two biographies: "I wrote The Peabody Sisters partly to prove that the New England Transcendentalists included other brilliant women besides Fuller.
Then I discovered that during the 20 years I’d spent researching the Peabodys, Fuller had been largely forgotten. Number one recognized her name anymore. This was a shock to me, and a loss I wanted to repair." In addition to her books, Marshall writes occasionally for The New Yorker, Slate, The New York Times Book Review, The London Review of, and other publications.
She was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University in 2006-2007, and writes book reviews for Radcliffe Magazine.
Since 2007 she has been Assistant Professor in Writing, Literature & Publishing at Emerson College. Marshall lives in Belmont, Massachusetts.
( Elizabeth, Mary, and Sophia Peabody were in many ways ...)
( Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography "Thoroughly...)
Her first biography The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism (2005) earned her a place as a finalist for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for or Autobiography.