Maria Susanna Cummins

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Maria Susanna Cummins
Born (1827-04-09)April 9, 1827
Salem, Massachusetts
Died October 1, 1866(1866-10-01) (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.

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

[4]

  • 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

  1. ↑ Cummins, Maria Susanna - Introduction
  2. ↑ Riegel, Robert Edgar. American Women: A Story of Social Change. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1970: 166. ISBN 0-8386-7615-4
  3. ↑ 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
  4. ↑ 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. Wikisource

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