|
|
Chapter 3:
Nineteenth Century to 1865
Romanticism
Maria Susanna
Cummins
1827-1866
|
©
Paul P. Reuben
September 12, 2019
E-Mail
|
Page Link: |
MLA Style
Citation of this Web Page
|
Site Links: | Chap
3: Index
|
Alphabetical
List
|
Table
Of Contents
|
Home
Page
|
"America is now wholly
given over to a d****d mob of scribbling women, and I should have no
chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their
trash--and should be ashamed of myself if I did succeed. What is the
mystery of these innumberable editions of The Lamplighter and
other books neither better nor worse? Worse they could not be, and
better they need not be, when they sell by the hundred thousand." -
Hawthorne's 1855 letter to his publisher William D. Ticknor, quoted
in Pattee, Fred L. The Feminine Fifties. NY: Appleton-Century
Co., 1940. p. 110.
Born in Salem,
Massachusetts, on April 9, 1827, Maria Cummins was educated at home
and at a fashionable girls' school in Lenox, Massachusetts. She
thereafter lived all her life with her family in Dorchester,
Massachusetts. She developed an interest in writing during her school
days, and the publication of some of her early short stories
encouraged her. In 1854 she published her first novel, The
Lamplighter, which was a huge and immediate success, selling
40,000 copies in a few weeks and 70,000 in a year. The
Lamplighter combined sentimentality, piety, and improbability in
about equal portions and was perfectly suited to the rudimentary
taste of a newly awakened reading public. It was the book to which
Nathaniel Hawthorne specifically referred in his famous complaint
that "America is now wholly given over to a d__d mob of scribbling
women." English, French, and German editions were equally successful;
the book had few peers as a literary phenomenon. Cummins' later
novels, Mabel Vaughan (1857), El Fureidis (1860), and
Haunted Hearts (1864), showed some progress in technique but
failed to achieve the popularity of her first. She died in
Dorchester, Massachusetts, on October 1, 1866.
Copyright ©
1999 Encyclopędia Britannica, Inc.
Primary
Works
The
Lamplighter, 1854; Mabel Vaughan, 1857; El
Fureidis, 1860; Haunted Hearts, 1864.
Selected
Bibliography
Elbert, Monika M. ed.
Separate Spheres No More: Gender Convergence in American
Literature, 1830-1930. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2000.
Estes, Glenn E. ed.
American Writers for Children Before 1900. Detroit: Gale,
1985.
Knight, Denise D. ed.
Writers of the American Renaissance: An A-to-Z Guide.
Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2003.
Knight, Denise D., and
Emmanuel S.Nelson. eds. Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers:
A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook. Westport, CT:
Greenwood, 1997.
MLA Style
Citation of this Web Page
Reuben, Paul P.
"Chapter 3: Maria Susanna Cummins" PAL: Perspectives in
American Literature- A Research and Reference Guide. WWW URL: http://www.paulreuben.website/pal/chap3/cummins.html
(provide page date or your date of logon).
| Top
|