Margaret Fuller

Fuller was educated by her father like a prodigy of the previous century — Latin at six, reading Virgil while other children played — and grew into the best-read person in the Transcendentalist circle, by their own admission. She taught, translated Goethe, and led her famous 'Conversations' in Boston: paid seminars where women, barred from universities, thought out loud about everything the age reserved for men.

Emerson recruited her to edit The Dial, the movement's magazine, where her essay on the rights and nature of women grew into Woman in the Nineteenth Century — the first major American argument that the soul has no sex and that every barrier around a woman's growth wounds the whole of humanity. Horace Greeley then hired her as the New-York Tribune's first female editor and foreign correspondent.

In Europe she found her way to revolutionary Rome, ran a hospital through the French siege of 1849, and married an Italian marquis turned republican soldier. Sailing home in 1850 with her husband and infant son, she drowned in a shipwreck within sight of Fire Island, New York. She was forty. Thoreau walked the beach for days searching for her manuscript on the revolution; it was never found.