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(©Copyright 2014 Open Road Integrated Media. "My New BFF," was originally published as a guest blog for the Open Road Media Project with Gloria Steinem, "Reading Our Way to the Revolution.")

I have always been curious about Margaret Fuller. I knew only enough to think of her as the hippie of 19th-century feminists.

I picked up Margaret Fuller: A New American Life by Megan Marshall, eager to get to the hippie part - Brook Farm, the commune she founded in the 1820s with her Transcendentalist friends Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. That turned out to be a minor moment in the rich and radical life of this journalist, activist, intellectual and social rebel, who was dubbed a "fore-sayer" because of her visionary and mind-blowing ideas.

Reading this lively biography was like discovering a long lost girlfriend. If we sat down over a cup of coffee, I know we would get right down to the kind of wide-ranging and irreverent conversation that I look for in a new friend. In her most influential book Woman in the Nineteenth Century, for example, she addressed a circumstance any woman of any era would recognize. Why, she wondered, do women fall for bad men? "The preference often shown by women for bad men arises," she wrote, "from a confused idea that they are bold and adventurous, acquainted with regions which women are forbidden to explore."

She understood that she was too smart for her own good and too outspoken for a woman of her times - "a mind that insisted on utterance" - but was unapologetic about it, and bore the consequences. She had passionate intellectual relationships with like-minded men - including Emerson, who shared endless details about his unhappy marriage, but never considered Margaret more than a pal. She formed what were consciousness-raising groups - called Conversations - among the educated women in her Boston circle. Not surprisingly to my generation of feminists, when the men insisted on being included - to raise the level of discussion - the meetings lost energy.

She became a crusading columnist, a first, and was sent to Rome by the pioneering newspaper editor Horace Greely to cover the revolutions of 1848. As her assignment became more bloody and dangerous, she, in the Hemingway tradition of (male) war correspondents to come, fell in love - with an impoverished and uneducated young Italian marchese. When she became pregnant, she didn't abandon her post and gave birth to their child in the midst of a bombing raid.

Knowing she had broken every rule in the book, she hesitated to return to America, and when she finally decided to brave the censure and sail for home with her family, all three of them were drowned in a shipwreck off Fire Island in 1850. She was only 40. Yet, as Marshall points out, she had already found heaven - a life "empowering [her] to incessant acts of vigorous beauty."

- Suzanne Braun Levine

Suzanne Braun Levine is a writer, editor and nationally recognized authority on women, families and media. She was the first editor of Ms. magazine (1972-1988), and the first woman editor of the prestigious Columbia Journalism Review. She reports on the ongoing changes in women's lives in her books, on television, radio, at lectures and on her website. She's the author of four books, including You Gotta Have Girlfriends - A Post-Fifty Posse Is Good For Your Health. In 2014, she served on the EBWW faculty.