Young, brazen, beautiful, and unapologetically brilliant, Margaret Fuller accepts an invitation from Ralph Waldo Emerson, the celebrated Sage of Concord, to meet his coterie of enlightened friends. There she becomes the radiant genius and fiery heart of the Transcendentalists, a role model to a young Louisa May Alcott, an inspiration for Nathaniel Hawthornes Hester Prynne and the scandalousScarlet Letter,a friend to Henry David Thoreau as he ventures out to Walden Pond . . . and a muse to Emerson.But Margaret craves more than poetry and interpersonal drama, and her restless soul needs new challenges and adventures.

And so she charts a singular course against a backdrop of dizzying historical drama: From Boston, where she hosts a salon for students like Elizabeth Cady Stanton; to the editorial meetings ofThe Dialmagazine, where she hones her pen as its co-founder; to Harvards library, where she is the first woman permitted entry; to the gritty New York streets where she spars with Edgar Allan Poe and reports on Frederick Douglass. Margaret defies conventions time and again as an activist for women and an advocate for humanity, earning admirers and critics alike.

When the legendary editor Horace Greeley offers her an assignment in Europe, Margaret again makes history as the first female foreign news correspondent, mingling with luminaries like Frdric Chopin, William Wordsworth, George Sand and more. But it is in Rome that she finds a world of passion, romance, and revolution, taking a Roman count as a loverand sparkingan international scandal. Evolving yet again into the roles ofmother and countess, Margaret enters the fight for Italys unification.