Bright Circle by Randall Fuller

Bright Circle: Five Remarkable Women in the Age of Transcendentalism

by Randall Fuller

Oxford University Press, 2025

It’s hard to overstate the impact of transcendentalism on American culture. At the heart of the nineteenth-century spiritual philosophy was a seeming contradiction. Founded by a group of intellectuals committed to a life of rigorous study, transcendentalism nevertheless embraced intuition rather than strict empiricism. Abandoning the doctrines of organized religious practice, many transcendentalists believed that spending time alone in nature would allow individuals to gain profound insights deeper than anything they could learn in a library. “In the woods, we return to reason and faith,” argued Ralph Waldo Emerson. “I become a transparent Eyeball…. I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.”

The transcendentalist movement has been the subject of numerous published studies from academic tomes to popular works, from granular studies to generalist overviews. One is Robert A. Gross’s brilliant The Transcendentalists and Their World (2021) which puts the story of men like Emerson and his protégé Henry David Thoreau into historical and geographic context. Responding to the dying embers of Puritanism and the expansion of democracy, they turned the tiny village of Concord, Massachusetts into the home of one of the most influential movements in America.

In Bright Circle: Five Remarkable Women in the Age of Transcendentalism, Randall Fuller expands that history in three major ways. First, he looks closely at the role women played in the movement. Second, he emphasizes that transcendentalism was connected not only to Concord but to the city of Boston. Finally, in what is the most fascinating idea presented in Fuller’s book, he shows that although Emerson and Thoreau stressed individualism and solitude, other transcendentalists—especially women—believed that “thinking was a collaborative affair” and they therefore committed themselves to communal experiences of serious conversation.

In 1840, Elizabeth Peabody established a bookstore in downtown Boston that soon became what Fuller calls an “intellectual mecca” where “eccentric philosophers and social radicals” from near and far eagerly gathered to buy books and chat with each other about “divinely inspired creativity,” the idea that all humans contained a divine spark, and other transcendentalist ideas. Although we might think that transcendentalism emerged “in the cluttered study at Emerson’s house” in Concord, or “the tiny cabin Thoreau built on Walden Pond” on land Emerson owned, Fuller suggests that “Elizabeth Peabody’s bookshop was every bit as important to the development of the movement.” It was, he says, “at the very center of tremendous cultural ferment.” Peabody was also the first person to refer to the movement as transcendentalism.

Before Peabody opened her bookshop, Mary Moody Emerson had already devoted her life to intellect, independence, and a personal faith built on emotion, intuition, and a deep connection to nature. She developed her thinking in volumes she bound with thread. Fuller writes that “into these Almanacks she poured her inward adventures,” eventually filling thousands of pages with “an endless unspooling account of her quicksilver mind, the changeable climate of her soul.” She sometimes shared the journals with friends and relatives—including her young nephew Ralph Waldo Emerson, whom she helped educate.

When the young man started college, he and Mary established “a written conversation”—a correspondence that profoundly influenced her nephew’s thinking. “She offered Waldo her best ideas,” explains Fuller, “her transporting inspiration.” He found her work so powerful that he copied her words into notebooks of his own, eventually filling almost a thousand pages. When he embarked on his career as a minister, he asked her for her Almanacks. Her nephew “wanted to mine them for the benefit of his congregation,” writes Fuller, “to appropriate her inspired thoughts for his own sermons.” Mary eventually submitted. In his first book Nature, he “assimilated her spirit,” as Fuller writes, and “metabolized the side-angles of her vision.” The book was “Mary’s as much as Waldo’s,” states Fuller, “—arguably even more.” Many of the tenets for which Ralph Waldo Emerson became known were ideas his aunt had explored thirty years earlier.

Bright Circle also contains detailed discussions of Elizabeth Peabody’s sister Sophia, an artist who eventually married the author Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Lydia Jackson Emerson, second wife to Waldo Emerson. Both women, despite initially resisting the roles of wife and mother, eventually dedicated much of their lives to raising families. Within that sphere, Lydia Emerson’s influence was especially profound. Her husband’s commitment to individualism and his desire for solitude sometimes meant Waldo overlooked “the misery of the enslaved—as if to do so was to threaten his own sovereignty, to puncture his hard-won equanimity.” Lydia served as a moral conscience to her husband, challenging him to support abolitionism and other reform efforts by pointing out, as Fuller writes, “how inadequate were calls for self-reliance when enslaved people leaped into the ocean in a desperate bid for freedom.”

“We picture the life of the mind as solitary,” writes Fuller, “but thought and creativity are communal endeavors.” All of the women mentioned so far were surrounded by dialogue—chatting with fellow shoppers at the bookstore, writing letters to each other and sharing journal entries, or engaging in the daily discourse that happens within marriage. But Margaret Fuller brought community conversation to transcendentalism in a much more intense way. She facilitated a series of formal discussion groups, held at Elizabeth Peabody’s bookstore in Boston, with roughly two dozen women who wished to engage in intellectual discussions they were seldom able to engage in otherwise. There they talked about great art, philosophy, world history, and the classical languages they were trying to teach themselves since few had access to anything more than a primary education. They also talked about their spiritual beliefs and their commitments to the abolitionist movement.

A master conversationalist, Fuller encouraged participants to consider what it meant to be women, and how their sex shaped their personal lives and social roles. “Fuller’s conversations reshaped their perceptions, altered their understanding of their place in the world,” writes the author. “The talk expanded their sense of who they could be." Over many sessions, the women talked about various facets of the issue, with Fuller taking careful notes all the while. These conversations among women laid the groundwork for essays Fuller would soon write. “What woman needs is not as a woman to act or rule,” she argued in one, “but as a nature to grow, as an intellect to discern, as a soul to live freely and unimpeded.”  This classically transcendentalist approach to the question soon changed. By the time her book Women in the Nineteenth Century came out, she was more interested in analyzing the subjugation women experienced. What she was writing in her book was less related to spiritual concerns than to political ones. This book—inspired by the transcendentalism-inspired Conversations—was the start of American feminism.

In gorgeous prose, Randall Fuller tells these women’s stories with rigor but also with curiosity and compassion. In short, Bright Circle is both scholarly and deeply moving.

Hannah Joyner lives in Washington, D.C. Her books include Unspeakable and From Pity to Pride. You can find her on Booktube at https://www.youtube.com/c/HannahsBooks.