Susanna Rowson
Susanna Haswell Rowson | |
---|---|
Pen name | Susanna Rowson |
Occupation |
|
Notable works | Charlotte Temple |
Spouse | William Rowson |
Relatives | Robert Haswell (brother) James Gabriel Montresor (uncle) John Montresor (cousin) Anthony Haswell (cousin) |
Susanna Rowson, née Haswell (1762 – 2 March 1824), was an American novelist, poet, playwright,
Biography
Childhood
Susanna Haswell was born in 1762 in
Pen and stage
It was as a governess living in Westminster that she wrote her first work, Victoria, dedicated to the Duchess of Devonshire and published in 1786. On 17 October of the same year, she married William Rowson, a hardware merchant who came from a theatrical family[3] as well as reportedly being a Royal Horse Guards trumpeter. In 1791 in London, as 'Mrs. Rowson', she published the novel for which she is best known, Charlotte: A Tale of Truth, later reissued in America as Charlotte Temple, where it became the new nation's first best-selling novel.[4] This popular story of seduction and remorse has gone through more than 200 editions.[5] The novel sparked much controversy, both over its content and whether it could actually be considered a novel due to its minimal number of pages.
After William's hardware business failed and his father died in 1791, Susanna and William took in his orphaned sister Charlotte Rowson and they all turned to acting, William appearing as a member of the company of the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, while Susanna joined the Theatre Royal, Edinburgh.[6] In 1793, the three Rowsons were recruited for the Philadelphia theatre company of Thomas Wignell, also performing with them in Baltimore.
Over the next three years in Philadelphia, she wrote a novel, an opera, a musical
Later years
In 1796, Susanna reestablished contact with her old Edinburgh director, John Brown Williamson. He had taken over the Federal Street Theatre in Boston, and the Rowson trio relocated there in part to be closer to the more familiar residence of her youth and her core American literary fan base. The bankruptcy and major restructuring of the Boston theatre in 1797 would have sent Susanna and William to Charleston, but rather than head south they abandoned the stage after a few summer performances in Newport and Providence, Rhode Island. William clerked for a Boston merchant who went bankrupt, and having co-signed bonds, he was briefly imprisoned for his employer's debt. He was then hired at the Boston Custom House and there was employed for almost four decades.[8] On leaving the stage, Susanna opened the first "female academy" in Boston in 1797 "Mrs Rowson's Academy for Young Ladies. The earliest American map samplers (1779,1780) were by students Lydia Withington and Sally Dodge who were educated there and cover detailed images of Boston harbour and islands and detailed street plan.[9] Desiring a more rural setting, Rowson would move her school to Medford, then to Newton, Massachusetts, before returning it to Boston in 1809. She was a leader on female education and also the first woman geographer, publishing the first American education book on geography Rowson's Abridgement of Universal Geography in 1805, a textbook focussing on human geography not maps and including information on the position of women, the cultural, religious, financial and social structure of different continents and in particular the impact of the 'barbarous, degrading traffic' of slavery. She also published Youth's First Steps in Geography in 1811.[9] She managed her school until 1822 and trained hundreds of girls overall.
Rowson also continued her writings, producing several novels, an additional work for the stage, a dictionary as well as the two geographies and as a contributor to the
Works
Fiction
- Victoria (1786)
- The Inquisitor (1788)
- Mary, or, The Test of Honour (1789)
- Charlotte: a Tale of Truth (1791; retitled Charlotte Temple after the 3rd American edition, 1797)
- Mentoria; or, the Young Lady's Friend (1791)
- Rebecca, or, The Fille de Chambre (1792)
- Trials of the Human Heart (1795)
- Reuben and Rachel; or, Tales of Old Times (1799)
- Sarah (1813)
- Charlotte's Daughter, or, The Three Orphans (a sequel to Charlotte Temple published posthumously in 1828, with a memoir by Samuel L. Knapp; also known as Lucy Temple)
Plays
- Slaves in Algiers; or, A Struggle for Freedom (1794)[10]
- The Female Patriot (1795)[10]
- The Volunteers (1795)[10]
- Americans in England (1796; retitled Columbian Daughters for 1800 production)
- The American Tar (1796)
- Hearts of Oak (1811)
Verse
- Poems on Various Subjects (1788)
- A Trip to Parnassus (1788)
- The Standard of Liberty (1795)
- Miscellaneous Poems (1811)
Other
- An Abridgement of Universal Geography (1805)
- A Spelling Dictionary (1807)
- A Present for Young Ladies (1811)
- Youth's first Step in Geography (1811)
- Biblical Dialogues Between a Father and His Family (1822)
- Exercises in History, Chronology, and Biography, in Question and Answer (1822)
References
- ^ Susanna Rowson (2011) [1791]. Pattie Cowell. Introduction. Charlotte Temple (PDF). Bedford/St. Martin's. Retrieved 16 January 2013.
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) - Haymarket Theatre. His daughters Elizabeth Rowson and Jane Rowson, later Mrs. Crow, danced at Covent Garden, as briefly did a daughter-in-law, Charlotte (Beverley) Rowson. She and her husband John Baker Rowson would later perform with circuses and theatre companies at Philadelphia, New York, Richmond, Virginia and Augusta, among other locales. Usually billed simply as Mr., Mrs. or Miss Rowson, these performers are frequently confused. Todd A. Farmerie, "The Rowsons of Marylebone, a Thespian Family in England and America", American Ancestors Journal, supplement to The New England Historical and Genealogical Register, 2014, 168:352-368.
- ISBN 0-292-76450-2
- ^ a b "Susanna Rowson". Encyclopædia Britannica Inc. Retrieved 11 March 2015.
- Twayne Publishers, 1964: 13, Farmerie, "The Rowsons of Marylebone".
- emetic." (Nason, A Memoir . . ., p. 85)
- ^ Farmerie, "The Rowsons of Marylebone"
- ^ OCLC 1079199690.
- ^ ISBN 0-292-76450-2
Further reading
- Davidson, Cathy N., edited with an introduction by, Charlotte Temple – Susanna Rowson (Oxford, c1987).
- Homestead, Melissa J., and Camryn Hansen. (2010). Susanna Rowson's Transatlantic Career. Early American Literature, 45:3, 619–654.
- Kornfeld, Eve. (1983). Women in Post-Revolutionary American Culture: Susanna Haswell Rowson's American Career, 1793–1824. Journal of American Culture, 6:4, 56–62.
- Nason, Elias. (1870). A Memoir of Mrs. Susanna Rowson. Albany, NY: J. Munsell.
- Parker, Patricia L. (1986). Susanna Rowson. Boston: Twayne Publishers.
- Rust, Marion, Prodigal Daughters – Susanna Rowson's Early American Women (The University of North Carolina Press, c2008).
- Vinson, James, ed. (1979). Great Writers of the English Language: Novelists and Prose Writers. New York: St. Martin's Press. pp. 1046–1048.
External links
- Media related to Susanna Rowson at Wikimedia Commons
- Works by Susanna Rowson in eBook form at Standard Ebooks
- Works by Mrs. Rowson at Project Gutenberg
- Works by or about Susanna Rowson at Internet Archive
- Works by or about Mrs. Rowson at Internet Archive
- Works by Susanna Rowson at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
- Laraine Fergenson, 'Susanna Haswell Rowson (1762–1824)', Heath Anthology of American Literature