Charles Capper, author of Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life:
What the journal was to Ralph Waldo Emerson the letter was to Margaret Fuller: a perfect medium for expressing the intimate, transcendent, and socially embedded life of the mind. Thanks to Robert Hudspeth's authoritative one-volume collection, readers now have an accessible and well-chosen sampling of these private performances by one of America's most fascinating intellectual personalities.
This volume of selections from the larger oeuvre will make Fuller accessible to a larger number of readers. Specialists and general readers with an interest in 19th-century American culture alike owe a debt to Hudspeth for this welcome contribution to scholarship.
This selection of letters draws a comprehensive and balanced picture of the transcendentalist... Robert N. Hudspeth provides very brief and exceedingly helpful biographical sketches of the correspondents... This volume is an excellent alternative for academic and public libraries that were unable to afford the larger work.
Elizabeth Hardwick:
Margaret Fuller's vivid letters are a fascinating contribution to American history and culture.
Caleb Crain:
In My Heart is a Large Kingdom: Selected Letters of Margaret Fuller, Hudspeth has carved an elegant single volume of letters out of the complete and authoritative six that he has already edited. Hudspeth is a scholar's scholar: meticulous, unobtrusive, indefatigable. And in My Heart is a Large Kingdom, he reveals that he also has a novelist's eye.... Thanks to Hudspeth's scrupulous edition, it is easier to meet the private Fuller than ever before.
Joan von Mehren, author of Minerva and the Muse: A Life of Margaret Fuller:
Hudspeth's six-volume edition of Margaret Fuller's letters revitalized Fuller and spurred the current Fuller revival. Hours spent in the company of this remarkable woman inMy Heart is a Large Kingdom will inform, provoke, and delight anyone interested in life and letters in nineteenth-century America.
Elaine Showalter:
Hudspeth's selection of Margaret Fuller's letters is likely to win her new readers and admirers.... Had she survived, her public writings might have grown more like her private letters, capable of touching readers' emotions as well as their intellects. Perhaps the tragic story revealed in these letters will move Margaret Fuller beyond the textbooks at last.
Christina Zwarg, Haverford College:
Hudspeth's clever spirit rapping serves to remind us that Fuller remains obscure not only to most American citizens but also to many serious scholars of American literature.... Only scholarship as ambitious and accomplished as Hudspeth's can restore Fuller's place in what Emerson called an 'essential line of American history.'
Madeleine B. Stern, author of The Life of Margaret Fuller:
Here Margaret Fuller speaks for herself and, thanks to Robert Hudspeth's judicious selection of her letters, she also reanimates the world she lived in and the world she hoped for.
Joel Myerson, Carolina Distinguished Professor of American Literature, University of South Carolina:
Drawn from Hudspeth's masterful six-volume edition of Fuller's letters, this selection is the definitive life-in-letters of one of America's first and most famous feminists and woman of letters, and is a mandatory purchase for anyone interested in women of the nineteenth century.
A splendid selection of letters.
