You Know Emerson and Thoreau. Why Not Their Female Counterparts?

BRIGHT CIRCLE: Five Remarkable Women in the Age of Transcendentalism, by Randall Fuller

Miss Peabody’s Book Room, at 13 West Street in Boston, was no ordinary bookstore. It was a place of intellectual pilgrimage. Inspired by the German Romantic thinkers, Elizabeth Peabody — who knew 10 languages before the age of 25 and had devised her own interpretation of the Scriptures — was determined to “move the mountains of custom and convention” and create a space where ideas could disseminate and lives transform. If the Transcendentalist movement conjures up images of Ralph Waldo Emerson ruminating in his study, or Henry David Thoreau shivering on the banks of Walden Pond, it looks rather different, Randall Fuller argues in “Bright Circle,” if you consider Peabody’s bookshop, instead, as its center — its presiding ideal not solitude, but communality.

From 1840, Peabody’s became the meeting place for a motley group of women, aged between 13 and 60, who came together simply to talk. These “conversations” were the brainchild of Margaret Fuller, a free-spirited critic and editor widely considered the best-read woman in New England, who believed, writes the author (a very distant relation), that “the individual came into radiant being" through interaction.

These women were hungry for knowledge; excluded from formal education, they had pursued their own courses — plying ministers with questions, devising reading programs, initiating correspondences — and the conversations provided them with much-desired structure, motivation and solidarity.

If sessions began with discussions of literature, Greek mythology and philosophy, it was Fuller who tended to bring the debates around to the topics of girls’ education, marriage and motherhood, and the unrealized potential she saw among her female peers. “What were we born to do?” she urgently asked the group. “How shall we do it?”

The conversations — which one participant called “a vindication of woman’s right to think” — became the basis of Fuller’s groundbreaking book, “Woman in the Nineteenth Century”; they were, “Bright Circle” suggests, the foundations of the American women’s rights movement.