Two women stood out as journalists in the United States before the Civil War: Lydia Maria Child and Margaret Fuller. Child, a novelist, sister of a founding member of the Transcendental Club Convers Francis, between August 1841 and March 1843 published in the Boston National Anti-Slavery Standard a series of lively correspondences from New York, called “letters,” which documented the beginning of the city's transformation into a teeming multiethnic metropolis. Child and Fuller actually knew each other: the former, eight years older, attended Fuller's 1839 famous “Conversations” and was impressed by her knowledge and magnetic influence on the participants. In the fall of 1844, Fuller moved from Boston to New York, having accepted an offer from Horace Greeley, editor of the New-York Daily Tribune, to join the editorial board as a regular literary critic and social commentator. The author of the just published Summer on the Lakes enjoyed the privilege of signing her contributions with her name, which was unusual since at that time literary reviews, regardless of the critic's gender, were published anonymously. In the spring of 1846, another offer came and was accepted too: Greeley sent Fuller as a foreign correspondent of the New-York Tribune to Europe. First, she landed in Britain, then went to Paris, and eventually moved to Italy, from which she was never to return.

Out of her thirty-seven dispatches sent to New York between August 1846 and January 1850, nine and a half were about Britain, only three and a half about France, mainly Paris, and the remaining twenty-three and a half referred to Italy, mainly Rome. Leaving the United States forever, Fuller, who turned thirty-six, was one of the best prepared Americans to face the Old World with its heritage, contemporary literature, art, and politics. She knew what and whom to visit in Britain, could read and understand French, read and speak German, and had been fascinated with Italy or, rather, with ancient Rome, since childhood, when her father made her learn Latin and read Latin historians in the original. According to Larry J. Reynolds, “In her private mythology, Fuller always imagined Europe as her true home, a place where she would flourish.