Miss Fuller by April Bernard Read Free Book Online Page A

offering something for sale, papers he thought, from the wreck. He directed him to a fishing shack which stood close by the grave-yard.

    The family had decided that no further moving could take place until Henry was home. In the lull, Anne visited the widow Allan at her two-room shack down by the creek, where she tended her vegetable garden and took in washingand mending. Dolly Allan’s own children were grown and gone, and she had worked for the family as house-maid and nurse-maid when Anne was little. Anne had tried for years to educate her; and although she no longer tried, she still read to her.
    That day she brought with her Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century . As she held the delicate volume in her hand, she thought how much more discreet and seemly than its author the object was. Dolly was pulling weeds; Anne set down her book and basket — which contained a thick slice of ham, a loaf of bread, and a cup of cream as well as a jar of lemonade — and bent to help her.
    Inside, they put the food away. Anne opened the jar and poured the lemonade into cups as Dolly washed at the sink pump. They settled into their usual postures: Anne with the book on a cushion on the floor, Dolly sitting on a chair behind her, embracing her with her knees. The old woman unpinned and unbraided the young woman’s light brown hair. As Anne read, Dolly combed and stroked, dipped her comb into rose-petal water, combed the hair through, braided it, unbraided it, twisted it up and pinned it, then unpinned it and combed it some more. Anne propped her elbow on Dolly’s knee; the older woman’s cotton skirt was patterned with green sprigs, faded to the same hue as the book.
    Woman in the Nineteenth Century had made Miss Fuller famous. It had made it possible for her to go to England,where the book had excited admiration; and to France and Italy, where it had appeared in translations almost immediately. But Anne had never read it. She found that the style took some getting used to. She thought, as she paused occasionally to make sense of what she had just read aloud, that it was not exactly flowery — but rather somehow vegetal, vine-like, even mouldy, each sentence adhering around some central idea, with examples.
In clear triumphant moments, many times, has rung through the spheres the prophecy of his [man’s] jubilee, and those moments, though past in time, have been translated into eternity by thought; the bright signs they left hang in the heavens, as single stars or constellations, and, already, a thickly sown radiance consoles the wanderer in the darkest night. Other heroes since Hercules have fulfilled the zodiac of beneficent labors, and then given up their mortal part to the fire without a murmur; while no God dared deny that they should have their reward.
    Miss Fuller began with an invocation of Man’s capacity for the heroic, and went on to explain that Man cannot be fully heroic until Woman is allowed to be heroic beside him. In her first intimation of the main argument, she wrote of women that:
Those who till a spot of earth scarcely larger than is wanted for a grave, have deserved that the sun should shine upon its sod till violets answer.
    Anne looked up from the book and said, “That’s elegant. It sounds a lot like Henry.”
    “All done?” asked Dolly, making a final twist and pinning Anne’s hair back into place.
    “It goes on forever, actually. I’ll bring something more lively next time. You need your nap.”
    She settled Dolly on her low bed.
    “How is the moving coming along?” Dolly asked.
    “Hectic — Mother throwing her hands in the air and shouting, and Father trying to pull the stove out of the wall. We hope Henry will come home soon to supervise.”
    “You need a home of your own.”
    “I know I do,” said Anne. “But I almost feel that I shouldn’t. Helen and John never had the chance to marry. Henry and Sissy — they both say they will never marry.”
    “But you must.”
    It