Summer on the Lakes, in 1843

In the summer of 1843, Margaret Fuller embarked on a journey that would become both a physical passage through the American frontier and an internal voyage away from the doctrines of her mentors. Traveling by train, steamboat, carriage, and foot through what was then considered the far western frontier, Fuller visited Niagara Falls, Mackinac Island, and Rock River, Illinois. But this travelogue is far more than a record of scenic wonders. It is an intensely personal account of one woman's intellectual coming-of-age, a meditation on the state of America and the state of her own soul. Through lyrical descriptions of waterfalls andprairie, through encounters with strangers and silence, Fuller traces her departure from pure Emersonian idealism toward her own hard-won philosophy. The result is a peculiar and riveting hybrid: sketches, poems, anecdotes, dialogues, and reflections woven into something that anticipates modern creative nonfiction. Here is a major American feminist finding her voice at the edge of the known world.