highly of the book, suggesting that its strength came in part from Fuller's conversational ability. As he called it, it was "rich extempore writing, talking with pen in hand". In the Evening Post, William Cullen Bryant noted "the thoughts it puts forth are so important that we ought to rejoice to know it read by every man and woman in America" despite some "pretty strong" language. Miriam Schneir also includes this text in her anthology Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings, labelling it as one of the essential feminist works. The influential editor Rufus Wilmot Griswold, believing Fuller went against his notion of feminine modesty, referred to Woman in the Nineteenth Century as "an eloquent expression of her discontent at having been created female". American author Nathaniel Hawthorne, previously a supporter of Fuller, was critical of her after Woman of the Nineteenth Century was published. The same was true of his wife, Sophia Hawthorne, who had attended some of her "Conversations" in Boston. Of Woman in the Nineteenth Century, she wrote: Woman in the Nineteenth Century, which has become one of the major documents in American feminism, is considered the first of its kind in the United States. Scholars have suggested Woman in the Nineteenth Century was the first major women's rights work since Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), beginning with a comparison between the two women made by George Eliot in her 1855 essay "Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft". Even so, Fuller's work is considered mainly literary today because oratory was more valued in the politics of her time. Oratory relied strictly on masculine conventions and women's writing was generally sentimental literature. Sandra M. Gustafson writes in her article, "Choosing a Medium: Margaret Fuller and the Forms of Sentiment", that Fuller's greatest achievement with "The Great Lawsuit" and Woman in the Nineteenth Century is the assertion of the feminine through a female form, sentimentalism, rather than through a masculine form as some female orators used. References External links Further reading Primary works Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845) Secondary works 1843 essays American essays History of women's rights in the United States Feminist essays Works originally published in The Dial 1845 books 1845 in women's history