Olivia Diamond

Stranger in My Own Land Olivia Diamond

Aboard a ship homeward bound to America from Italy in 1850, Margaret Fuller, the first woman foreign correspondent, narrates the story of her life. The daughter of a Massachusetts congressman who educated her in the classics, she fought to carve out a place for herself in the limited scope reserved for women in the nineteenth century, forging a path for other feminists to follow. A close friend with Thoreau and Emerson, she met many of the prominent figures of her day. She faces a less than warm welcome as she returns to her country with an eighteen-month-old child conceived out-of-wedlock and an Italian husband ten years her junior. If she, a woman born before her time, had lived, she would have continued to be a stranger in her own land. Shipwrecked on a sand bar, Margaret Fuller was forbidden re-entry into the land of her birth. The reach of Margaret Fuller was vast considering her short life span of forty years. To perish at the point at which she had come into her own as a journalist and a woman forms the tragic in this verse-novel told in her own voice. On her death, Horace Greeley wrote, "So passed away the loftiest, bravest soul that has yet irradiated the form of an American woman."