This year, the Margaret Fuller Society (MFS), once again, is spending time getting to know its leaders and members who live all over the world. This month we honor the work of Dr. Kathy Lawrence, who teaches at Georgetown University and is completing an edited volume of Henry James’s stories for the Cambridge University Press Complete Fiction of Henry James (forthcoming 2024), as well as a biography entitled Caroline Sturgis, Starlike Soul. To get to know Kathy, we asked her a few questions.
Q: What might MFS members ask you about?
A. I would like to tell MFS members about my travels in search of Fuller’s influence on three of her disciples: Caroline Sturgis, William Wetmore Story, and Henry James. Their discipleship was not imitative but rather individual, the fulfillment of their own vision for life, for she modeled how to be a seeker, not a follower. As a literary archivist, I have combed through repositories in London and Oxford, England, Paris, France, and Florence, Rome, and Venice, Italy. On our own continent, I have delved into libraries in Boston and Northampton, Massachusetts, New York, New York, Hanover, New Hampshire, Pasadena and Berkeley, California, Austin, Texas, and Charlottesville, Virginia. I have met the descendants and families of those artists. My wanderjahre has shown me the power of transmission, the presence of the unseen.
Q: What’s something about Fuller that you find inspiring?
A: What I admire about Fuller is her stoicism, a resilience and perseverance that inspired her three disciples (mentioned above) to live with their disabilities, both inherited and acquired, just as she had done. Like Fuller, Caroline Sturgis suffered, suffered terribly, and confronted severe losses, and she was ill for most of her life; yet she continued to write and paint, to raise her daughters to be artists, and to travel, as Fuller had encouraged her to do. William Wetmore Story was traumatized, running from New England and the humiliations he faced in Boston after his father Supreme CourtJustice Joseph Story was forced by his commitment to federalist principles to decide the infamous fugitive slave case Prigg vs. the State of Pennsylvania; yet, motivated by his attendance at Fuller’s only co-ed “Conversations,” he undertook to make a life in Rome and to become a successful sculptor. Henry James was lonely as a gay man in Victorian Boston; yet he pursued an arc of discovery that enabled him at long last to accept, indeed to celebrate, his identity, and to transmit it through his late fiction and non-fiction. He paid tribute to both Fuller and Sturgis near the end of his life in his memoir Notes of a Son and Brother (1914), a work that disclosed his queerness, his multiple disabilities and those of his family. In my recent article for the Henry James Review, I label this late style of James “the poetics of disclosure.”
Q: What would you like to see the MFS accomplish in the next five years?
A: An international conference in Italy!! Italy meant so much to Fuller and her work. It would be most appropriate for us to gather there.
Q: What is one thing you’ve learned or accomplished in the last year?
A: One thing I have learned in the past year is to meditate and to infuse every day with mindfulness. Fuller knew how to tap into this observation of direct experience, as shown in her autobiographical fragment, her poetry, and her letters. She was preternaturally aware, a core ability that bolstered her romanticism with realism.
After receiving her BA cum laude at Yale and her PhD at Boston University, in English and American Studies, respectively, Dr. Lawrence taught at George Washington University, Brandeis University, and is now at Georgetown University. In addition to her teaching, she is completing an edited volume of Henry James’s stories for the Cambridge University Press Complete Fiction of Henry James (forthcoming 2024), as well as a biography entitled Caroline Sturgis, Starlike Soul.
Below is a brief bibliography of possible interest to MFS members to get to know Dr. Lawrence’s writing and research:
“The ‘Dry-Lighted Soul’ Ignites: Emerson and His Soul-Mate Caroline Sturgis As Seen in Her Houghton Manuscripts.” Harvard Library Bulletin, Fall 2005, vol. 16, no. 3, 37-67.
“Soul Sisters and the Sister Arts: Margaret Fuller, Caroline Sturgis, and Their Private World of Love and Art.” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 54: 79-104.
“The Small Boy Was ‘Other’: Disability in James’s Fourth Phase.” The Henry James Review, Vol. 45, No. 1 (Winter 2024), pp. 47–71.
