Culture
Book Review: ‘Bright Circle,’ by Randall Fuller
Both she and Lydia Emerson, who married Ralph Waldo, sustained their marriages by compromising their own intellectual talents. Lydia — a staunch abolitionist, committed to the rights of women and animals — came to consider Transcendentalism’s doctrine of self-sufficiency hypocritical, relying as it did on the domestic labor without which these men’s lives of peaceful contemplation would crumble.
The men play minor roles here — perhaps too minor, as it’s sometimes hard to see why these brilliant women found them so alluring. Emerson comes off particularly badly, practically plagiarizing his aunt Mary’s writings, and being shown up by his wife’s far more progressive stance on slavery.
By the early 20th century, Fuller writes, Transcendentalism’s legacy had solidified around its male practitioners, while the women were “reduced to caricatures who stood at the fringes.” Fuller’s avowedly revisionist account assumes a reader more familiar with the men’s work than the women’s.
But, arguably, this is no longer the case. For decades, feminist scholars have worked to reassert the women’s centrality to the movement: See Phyllis Cole’s pioneering work on Mary Moody Emerson, and Megan Marshall’s wonderful biographies of the Peabody sisters and Margaret Fuller (whose writings, in 2025, will receive a Library of America edition, nearly two centuries after she died in a shipwreck, along with the manuscript of her history of the Roman Revolution). The legacy-building was set in motion by Elizabeth Peabody herself, who doggedly transcribed the group’s conversations when Fuller worried that talk was too ephemeral to make a historical impact.
These strident, provocative, eccentric, determined women can no longer justly be left out of any narrative of this movement. Reading about their lives together — and, in particular, the pleasure they found in one another’s examples — makes for a stark indictment of the society that put obstacles in the way of their self-expression.
BRIGHT CIRCLE: Five Remarkable Women in the Age of Transcendentalism | By Randall Fuller | Oxford University Press | 405 pp. | $27.99
Welcome to Literary Quotable Quotes, a quiz that tests your recognition of classic lines. This week’s installment highlights observations from future or alternate worlds depicted in popular science fiction. In the five multiple-choice questions below, tap or click on the answer you think is correct. After the last question, you’ll find links to the books if you’re intrigued and inspired to read more.
Welcome to Lit Trivia, the Book Review’s regular quiz about books, authors and literary culture. This week’s challenge tests your memory of books that made huge impacts on society after they were published — some of them even spurring changes to American laws. In the five multiple-choice questions below, tap or click on the answer you think is correct. After the last question, you’ll find links to the books if you’d like to do further reading.
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
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