Since her death in 1979, Elizabeth Bishop, who published only a hundred poems in her lifetime, has become one of America’s best-loved poets. And yet --- painfully shy and living out of public view in Key West and Brazil, among other hideaways— --- she has never been seen so fully as a woman and an artist. Megan Marshall makes incisive and moving use of a newly discovered cache of Bishop’s letters --- to her psychiatrist and to three of her lovers --- to reveal a much darker childhood than has been known, a secret affair, and the last chapter of her passionate romance with the Brazilian modernist designer Lota de Macedo Soares.

From an early age, Margaret Fuller provoked and dazzled New England’s intellectual elite. Her famous Conversations changed women’s sense of how they could think and live; her editorship of the Transcendentalist literary journal The Dial shaped American Romanticism. Megan Marshall tells the story of how Fuller, who was tired of Boston, accepted Horace Greeley’s offer to be the New-York Tribune’s front-page columnist.