Ralph Waldo Emersonthat ever-relevant grandfather-philosopher of American lettersraises important questions about marriage and freedom, commitment and self-fulfillment. Emerson himself never tried to reinvent the institution of marriage, but his close friend, the writer Margaret Fuller, was more radical. Born in 1810, she had received a boy's first-class education, and by the time she was in her twenties, she was so well-read that she had given up any hope of a normal woman's role, in marriage or in society. Still unmarried at thirty, Fuller pressed Emerson for an intimacy deeper than their friendship. Emerson would not betray his marriage, but in their journals, both writers questioned the value of monogamous marriage for men and women of genius. When she realized that Emerson was not as radical as his writing suggested, Fuller went to Europe, where she married an Italian Count. Giovanni Ossoli was barely literate, but Fuller thought that she could still fulfill other sides of herself in other relationships. Fuller never got to live out her experiment in marriage: she and her husband died in a shipwreck on returning to America in 1850.

But the questions Fuller's life had raisedabout how to reconcile marriage and self-relianceare still echoing now, in our discomfort with marriageand with any of the alternatives.