Margaret Fuller was born in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, on May 23, 1810. A remarkably precious child, she began to learn Latin at six and was reading Ovid by eight. In time she also became acquainted with German, French, Greek, and Italian. Formal schooling was not available for girls at the time, so she was tutored at home by her father. Following his death in 1835, she taught school in Providence and Boston, but after 1839 she occupied herself primarily with "conversations," which were held in her home with women of Boston in attendance. She was accepted by the Transcendentalists as an intellectual peer and allowed to edit their journal, the Dial, from 1840 to 1842. In 1844, she moved to New York City at the invitation of Horace Greeley. There she lived with the Greeleys and wrote literary criticism in Greeley's Tribune. Her work earned her a reputation as one of America's most astute literary critics. In addition, she did investigative reporting into prisons and asylums, which appeared in the pages of the Tribune as well. In 1846, she went to Europe, whee she met Thomas Carlyle and William Wordsworth in England and George Sand in Paris. Reaching Rome in 1847, she joined the circle around Giuseppe Mazzini and married one of his followers, Marquis Giovanni Angelo Ossoli. They had a son on September 5, 1848. Mazaini was one of the triumvirate that governed the short-lived Roman Republic. During the siege of Rome by French troops, Margaret worked in hospitals while her husband was engaged in combat. After the fall of the city, they fled to Florence, where she wrote a history of the Roman revolution. In 1850, they took passage on a ship back to America, but just off Fire Island, on July 19, 1850, the ship was lost in a storm and the family perished, along with the manuscript of her history.