American journalist and activist Margaret Fuller was BOTD in 1810. Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She was privately tutored by her father, before attending the Port School in Cambridge and the Boston Lyceum for Young Ladies. Following her father’s death in 1835, Fuller supported herself by teaching positions in Boston and Rhode Island. She befriended Transcendentalist writers Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Elizabeth Peabody, Amos Bronson Alcott (father of Louisa), Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne (who is thought to have based the character of Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter on Fuller). She became the first female editor of the Transcendentalist magazine The Dial, also contributing poetry and reviews. During the 1840s, she conducted a series of winter “conversations” to educate women on literature, education, mythology, and philosophy. She is best known for her 1845 book Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), a treatise on the place of women in contemporary society, in which she advocated for legal reform and better access to women’s education. The first edition sold out in a week, provoking national debates about women’s rights, and inspired emerging feminist leaders including Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. In 1844, she became literary editor of the New York Tribune, championing American and modern European literature. In 1846, she travelled to Europe as the Tribune‘s foreign correspondent, interviewing writers including George Sand and Thomas Carlyle and reporting on her travels. While in England, she met displaced aristocrat Giovanni Angelo Ossoli, moving with him to Italy and eventually marrying in 1848. They became involved in the Republican movement, eventually fleeing to Florence, where Fuller began work on a history of the revolution. In 1850 they sailed for America with their infant son. Two months later, their ship crashed off the coast of New York. Fuller (then aged 40), Ossini and their son were drowned and their bodies were never recovered. Fuller’s manuscript is also thought to have been lost. Historians and biographers have debated whether Fuller may have been bisexual, pointing to her writings about “manly women”, “womanly men” and same-sex attraction and her passionate friendships with men and women.