 Margaret Fuller was born in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, on 23 May 1810, the eldest child of Timothy Fuller and Margarett Crane Fuller. (Cambridgeport is now part of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the Margaret Fuller House where she was born is still standing.) Timothy Fuller was elected a Congressman from Massachusetts in 1817 and served until 1825. He lavished upon his eldest daughter a rigorous classical education usually reserved for boys. He taught her how to read at age three and a half, and she proved a child prodigy who rewarded Timothy’s attention. Her childhood curriculum included Latin prose, poetry, and composition, supplemented by Greek writings that included the New Testament as well as the classical philosophers, along with natural philosophy (natural science) and the wide-ranging discipline then called moral philosophy, which subsumed what we call the social sciences. When she was nine, her father added The Spectator, Paradise Lost, and Dr. Samuel Johnson to her reading list. Timothy’s stern manner and demanding requirements left young Margaret with emotional as well as scholarly legacies: she became obsessive and self-critical. 