Maria Susanna Cummins (April 9, 1827 – October 1, 1866) was an American novelist. She was the author of the widely popular novel ''The Lamplighter''.
Biography
Maria Susanna Cummins was born in
Salem, Massachusetts
Salem ( ) is a historic coastal city in Essex County, Massachusetts, located on the North Shore of Greater Boston. Continuous settlement by Europeans began in 1626 with English colonists. Salem would become one of the most significant seaports tr ...
, 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.
In 1854, she published the novel ''
The Lamplighter
''The Lamplighter'' is a sentimental novel written by Maria Susanna Cummins and published in 1854, and a best-selling novel of its era.
Plot synopsis
A female Bildungsroman, ''The Lamplighter'' tells the story of Gertrude Flint, an abandoned ...
'', 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". Within eight weeks, it sold 40,000 copies and totaled 70,000 by the end of its first year in print.
[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. ] 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.
Cummins died in Dorchester after a period of illness on October 1, 1866.
[(3 October 1866)]
Death of Miss Maria Cummins, The Author
''The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...
'' (reporting based on ''Boston Transcript'' story)
Selected bibliography
* 1854 : ''
The Lamplighter
''The Lamplighter'' is a sentimental novel written by Maria Susanna Cummins and published in 1854, and a best-selling novel of its era.
Plot synopsis
A female Bildungsroman, ''The Lamplighter'' tells the story of Gertrude Flint, an abandoned ...
''
* 1857 : ''Mabel Vaughan''
* 1860 : ''El Fureidis''
* 1864 : ''A Talk About Guides''
* 1864 : ''Haunted Hearts''
* 1865 : ''Around Mull''
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
External links
Dorchester Atheneum : Maria Susanna Cummins- biography
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* ''The Lamplighter'' by
''The Lamplighter''by Rebecca Saulsbury at the Literary Encyclopedia
"The Lamplighter"audio book a
"Librivox"
{{DEFAULTSORT:Cummins, Maria Susanna
1827 births
1866 deaths
19th-century American novelists
Writers from Salem, Massachusetts
Writers from Boston
American women novelists
19th-century American women writers
Novelists from Massachusetts
People from Dorchester, Massachusetts
Abbot Academy alumni