Maria Susanna Cummins
Maria Susanna Cummins | |
|---|---|
| File:Maria Susanna Cummins.jpg | |
| Born | April 9, 1827 |
| Died | October 1, 1866 (aged 39) Dorchester, Massachusetts |
| Occupation | Novelist |
| Genre | Romance, girls' books |
| Notable works | The Lamplighter (1854) |
Maria Susanna Cummins (April 9, 1827 – October 1, 1866) was an American novelist. She authored the novel The Lamplighter (1854).
Biography
[edit | edit source]Maria Susanna Cummins was born in Salem, Massachusetts, on April 9, 1827. She was the daughter of David Cummins and Maria F. Kittredge, and was the eldest of four children. 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. 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).
Cummins died in Dorchester after a period of illness on October 1, 1866, aged 39.[4]
Selected bibliography
[edit | edit source]- 1854 : The Lamplighter
- 1857 : Mabel Vaughan
- 1860 : El Fureidis
- 1864 : A Talk About Guides
- 1864 : Haunted Hearts
- 1865 : Around Mull
Further reading
[edit | edit source]- 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
[edit | edit source]- ^ Cummins, Maria Susanna - Introduction
- ^ Riegel, Robert Edgar. American Women: A Story of Social Change. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1970: 166. Lua error in Module:Citation/CS1/Configuration at line 2172: attempt to index field '?' (a nil value).
- ^ 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. Lua error in Module:Citation/CS1/Configuration at line 2172: attempt to index field '?' (a nil value).
- ^ (3 October 1866). Death of Miss Maria Cummins, The Author, The New York Times (reporting based on Boston Transcript story)
Wikisource reference This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Lua error in Module:Citation/CS1/Configuration at line 2172: attempt to index field '?' (a nil value).
External links
[edit | edit source]- Dorchester Atheneum : Maria Susanna Cummins Archived 2010-05-23 at the Wayback Machine - biography
- Works by Maria Susanna Cummins at Project Gutenberg
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- Works by Maria Susanna Cummins at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks) File:Speaker Icon.svg
- 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"
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