Poe's Quarrel with Boston Writers

Poe & Fuller: Writers, Editors, Rebels

Poe and Fuller deserve credit for acknowledging each other's intellectual and creative powers despite their very different views on gender. In her review of Poe's work, published in the July 11, 1845, issue of the New York Daily Tribune, Fuller saw Poe's tales as "refreshing." "His narrative proceeds with vigor, his colours are applied with discrimination, and where the effects are fantastic they are not unmeaningly so....The degree of skill shown in the management of revolting or terrible circumstances makes the pieces that have such subjects more interesting than the others. Even the failures are those of an intellect of strong fibre and well-chosen aim."

For his part, after praising Fuller for criticizing Longfellow, Poe notes the "independence and unmitigated radicalism" of Woman in the Nineteenth Century," and goes on to describe it as "nervous, forcible, thoughtful, suggestive, brilliant, and to a certain extent scholar-like. ... a book which few women in the country could have written, and no woman in the country would have published, with the exception of Miss Fuller." Master supreme of the left-handed compliment, Poe arrives at the following overview: "Miss Fuller has erred, too, through her own excessive objectiveness. She judges woman by the heart and intellect of Miss Fuller, but there are not more than one or two dozen Miss Fullers on the whole face of the earth."