evidence: Sarah Margaret Fuller was the first-born child to Timothy and Margarett Crane Fuller. Hers was a unique childhood, with a father who made special demands when it came to his daughter's rigorous education. Margaret met the challenge; a century and a half later, she might have been classified as a prodigy, or as "gifted." We follow her family through moves in Cambridge and throughout eastern Massachusetts, and through times of having money and then of having little. As she grew older, Margaret became a teacher, a writer, a Goethe researcher, a translator, a leader of formal conversations, and a caretaker to her siblings. She found creative outlets as the premier editor of The Dial (a task akin to herding cats), as the author of Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 and Woman in the Nineteenth Century, and then as a columnist for the New-York Tribune. Naturally, we peek into her relationships with some of her friends and colleagues: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bronson Alcott, Sarah and James Freeman Clarke, William Henry Channing, Horace Greeley, Frederic Henry Hedge, Sam and Anna Ward, Caroline Sturgis Tappan, and Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.