Maria Susanna Cummins

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Maria Susanna Cummins bigraphy, stories - Novelist

Maria Susanna Cummins : biography

April 9, 1827 – October 1, 1866

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.

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".Riegel, Robert Edgar. American Women: A Story of Social Change. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1970: 166. ISBN 0-8386-7615-4 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. ISBN 978-0-226-04179-7 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