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Chapter 11: Brook Farm.
A chapter on Brook Farm would be hardly needed, in a life of
Margaret Fuller, but for one single cause,--the magic wielded by a man of genius.
Zenobia in
Hawthorne's “Blithedale romance” has scarcely a trait in common with
Margaret Fuller; yet will be identified with her while the literature of the
English language is read.
Margaret Fuller had neither the superb beauty of
Zenobia, nor her physical amplitude, nor her large fortune, nor her mysterious husband, nor her inclination to suicide; nor, in fine, was she a member of the
Brook Farm community at all. These points of difference would seem to be enough, but were these ten times as many they would all be unavailing, and the power of the romancer would outweigh them all. It is impossible to make the readers of fiction understand that a novelist creates his characters as spiders their web, attaching the thread at some convenient point and letting it float off into free air; perhaps to link itself at last to something very far away.
George Sand has well said that to copy any character precisely from nature would be to
