Fuller sees “Bright Circle: Five Remarkable Women in the Age of Transcendentalism” (Oxford University Press) as something of a corrective to the “great man” hagiography that has gone before.

“Thoreau is remembered because of his fantastic writing of that experience,” Fuller said. “But he lived in a household full of women who were involved with all these other women, and he got ideas from them. He could go and live on that pond by himself because he was a guy. The women, on the other hand, were much more socially networked with each other, and that network attracted the attention of all sorts of writers, male and female. So, my argument is that the real birthplace of transcendentalism is in Elizabeth Palmer Peabody’s bookstore.”

Not only did the “Bright Circle” women give birth to transcendentalism, which Fuller defined as “a movement interested in the individual transcending the materialism of the moment for a greater connection to the absolute,” but one of them, Margaret Fuller, wrote what has come to be seen as the first work of American feminism with her 1845 book, “Woman in the Nineteenth Century.”

“Fifty-some years after the Declaration of Independence, when these women lived, there was just this ferment of ideas and a sense that, ‘Now we can create our own intellectual and literary culture,’” Fuller said. “So they’re excited about that. They’re getting ideas from England and Germany, but they’re also mixing them with more American experiences and creating something new.”

Fuller noted that he had “spent most of my professional career studying the men in the field of transcendentalism, especially (Ralph Waldo) Emerson and Thoreau, and … you quickly realize that there was this entire community of women in their lives who were contributing in all sorts of ways to their intellectual development.”

“For a long time I have thought the myth of the lone genius is just that — a myth — and that these really interesting women had largely been relegated to, for instance, the role of quirky aunt for Mary Moody Emerson or the subservient wife in the case of Lydia Emerson. And the more you delve into the archive of those women’s writings, the more you realize that they were actually, in many ways, not only at the forefront, but they were also influencing people like Emerson.”

Fuller said “the big aha moment” leading to “Bright Circle” came when he was interviewing for the position at KU and the Kenneth Spencer Research Library’s special collections curator, Elspeth Healey, told him she had something that might interest him: Ralph Emerson’s first book, “Nature,” inscribed to his aunt Mary, with her marginalia. Those notes, Fuller said, which were previously unknown to scholars of the field, “crystallized their relationship for me. It’s as if she had given intellectual birth to this person who then went beyond where she felt comfortable.”

The transcendentalists were, after all, descendants of the Puritans, Fuller said.

The scholar began tugging on that intellectual thread and ended up focusing on the work of five women who, he said, “contributed the most in a range of ways — some philosophically, some artistically, some culturally.”

The last of the five “Bright Circle” women was artist and writer Sophia Peabody, older sister of salon-keeper Elizabeth. Her sojourn in Cuba became fodder for an acclaimed journal that, in Fuller’s words, “expressed a poetic nature-worship that prefigured the more famous rhapsodies of male transcendentalists.” 

Not only does “Bright Circle” provide a window into early American feminism, but Fuller said the intellectual shift from a Puritan view of nature “as a wicked place … to be feared and subdued” to the transcendentalist view of it as a place of self-realization remains attractive to students today.

“There’s at least a thread of that intellectual tradition continuing into our current life,” he said.

Ensuring classroom excellence with the presence of preeminent educators is one of the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences’ priorities in the current campus fundraising campaign with KU Endowment. For information on how you can help support the College, please contact Sheri Hamilton, College Development Team Lead, at KU Endowment (785-832-7454).