The fifth volume of the collected letters of Margaret Fuller traces a period of great emotional turbulence, reflecting the personal struggles she faced in motherhood and the external strife of revolutionary Europe in 1848. The book opens as she takes up residence in Rome, where she continued to write essays for the New-York Daily Tribune and kept up a steady flow of commentary on the political situation for her family and friends.

Among Fuller's correspondents are Ralph Waldo Emerson, Giovanni Ossoli, William Wetmore Story, Giuseppe Mazzini, Horace Greeley, George William Curtis, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Many of the letters were written in Italian and are translated here for the first time. Since Fuller was more centrally involved in the Italian Risorgimento than any other American, they constitute an entirely new documentary source for historians of nineteenth-century Italy.