married name Marchesa Ossoli
born May 23, 1810, Cambridgeport, Mass., U.S.
died July 19, 1850, at sea off Fire Island, N.Y.
U.S. critic, teacher, and woman of letters.
She became part of the Transcendentalist circle (see Transcendentalism ), was a close friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson , and eventually became the founding editor of the Trancendentalist magazine The Dial (1840–42). Her Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 (1844), a study of frontier life, was followed by Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), a demand for women's political equality and a plea for women's intellectual and spiritual fulfillment. She traveled to Europe in 1846 as a correspondent for the New York Tribune . In Italy she married a revolutionary marquis; forced into exile, they perished in a shipwreck while returning to the U.S.