Maria Susanna Cummins
Houghton Mifflin Chronology of US Literature:
Top
Works by Maria Susanna Cummins
(1827-1866)
| 1854 | The Lamplighter. This wildly popular didactic romance would compel Hawthorne to remark bitterly about the "d----d mob of scribbling women" dominating publishing industry sales. In the novel, an afflicted orphan is taken in by a compassionate lamplighter, and, having been lovingly raised and taught virtues and religious faith, blossoms into a moralistic woman. In adulthood she is rewarded for her long suffering with marriage to a childhood friend. Translated into a number of languages, its first decade's sales show it to be second only to Uncle Tom's Cabin in popularity. |
| 1857 | Mabel Vaughan. A popular and critically successful follow-up to her bestseller The Lamplighter (1854). The novel concerns a woman who loses her wealth but gains morality when she rebuilds her family's life in the Illinois countryside. The North American Review finds the book an improvement over The Lamplighter and compliments its "strongly conceived" plot and "fresh, vivid, and authentic" descriptions of rural, city, and western life. |
| 1864 | Haunted Hearts. The author of the bestseller The Lamplighter (1854) fails to find an audience for this novel about a heroine who destroys her life by thoughtless acts. Later critics, such as Nina Baym, would be impressed by Cummins's portrait of a society offering limited possibilities to women, who are given "no power except to injure, and no moral destiny other than silent suffering." |
Wikipedia on Answers.com:
Top
Maria Susanna Cummins
| Maria Susanna Cummins | |
|---|---|
| Born | April 9, 1827 Salem, Massachusetts |
| Died | October 1, 1866 (aged 39) Dorchester, Massachusetts |
| Occupation | Novelist |
| Nationality | American |
| Genres | Romance, Girls' books |
| Notable work(s) | The Lamplighter |
Maria Susanna Cummins (April 9, 1827 – October 1, 1866) was an American novelist.
|
Contents
|
Biography
Maria Susanna Cummins was born in Salem, Massachusetts, on April 9, 1827. She was the daughter of Honorable David Cummins and Maria F. Kittredge, and was the eldest of four children from that marriage. The Cummins family resided in the neighborhood of Dorchester in Boston, Massachusetts. Cummins' father encouraged her to become a writer at an early age. She studied at Mrs. Charles Sedgwick's Young Ladies School in Lenox, Massachusetts.[1]
In 1854, she published the novel The Lamplighter, a sentimental book which was widely popular and which made its author well-known. One reviewer called it "one of the most original and natural narratives".[2] Within eight weeks, it sold 40,000 copies and totaled 70,000 by the end of its first year in print.[3] She wrote other books, including Mabel Vaughan (1857), none of which had the same success. Cummins also published in some of the popular periodicals of her day.
Selected bibliography
- 1864 : A Talk About Guides
- 1865 : Around Mull
- 1860 : El Fureidis
- 1864 : Haunted Hearts
- 1857 : Mabel Vaughan
- 1854 : The Lamplighter
Further reading
- Dictionary of Literary Biography. 1978ff. Detroit. Gale Research Company.
- Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary. 1971. Ed. Edward T. James, Janet Wilson James & Paul S. Boyer. 3 Bde. Cambridge, MA. The Belknap Press of Harvard UP.
References
- ^ Cummins, Maria Susanna - Introduction
- ^ Riegel, Robert Edgar. American Women: A Story of Social Change. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1970: 166. ISBN 0-8386-7615-4
- ^ Bell, Michael Davitt. "Women's Fiction and the Literary Marketplace in the 1850s", Culture, Genre, and Literary Vocation: Selected Essays on American Literature. University of Chicago Press, 2001: 141. ISBN 978-0-226-04179-7
- ^ Maria Susanna Cummins at eNotes
- 4. ^ Russian Wikipedia which gives Encyclopædia Brockhaus and Efron (1890-1907) for a source
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain : Cousin, John William (1910). A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature. London, J. M. Dent & Sons; New York, E. P. Dutton.
External links
- The Lamplighter by Maria Susanna Cummins at the Internet Archive
- The Lamplighter by Rebecca Saulsbury at the Literary Encyclopedia
- "The Lamplighter" audio book at "Librivox"
- Dorchester Atheneum : Maria Susanna Cummins - biography
  |
This article about a novelist of the United States born in the 1820s is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |
This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)
Post a question - any question - to the WikiAnswers community:
Copyrights:
Houghton Mifflin Chronology of US Literature
The Chronology of American Literature, edited by Daniel S. Burt. Copyright © 2004 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
Read more
