Margaret Fuller (May 23, 1810 – July 19, 1850) was an American writer, editor and intellectual associated with the Transcendentalist movement and with the emerging feminist movement. She was born in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, and educated rigorously by her father, Timothy, a Congressman, before attending schools for young ladies. She was an avid reader and by her 30’s had earned a reputation as the best-read person in New England. She was a gifted child and did not fit in, realizing early on that she was “not born to the common womanly lot.” She became a teacher and in 1839 organized a series of gatherings of local women to discuss the “great questions” facing women known as “Conversations”. In 1840 Ralph Waldo Emerson hired her as the first editor of his transcendentalist journal The Dial. In 1844 she joined the staff of the New York Tribune as the first full-time literary critic and first female editor. That same year she became the first woman allowed to use the library at Harvard College while researching her book Summer on the Lakes. In 1846 she journeyed to Europe as the first foreign correspondent for the Tribune. She became involved with the revolutions in Italy and allied herself with Giuseppe Mazzini. She also a relationship with Giovanni Ossoli, a marquis, with whom she had a child. Amid political turmoil in 1850, the family left Italy for the United States and perished when they sailed into a fierce hurricane and were shipwrecked off Fire Island, New York. Her body was never found.