Maria Susanna Cummins

Maria Susanna Cummins
Born	April 9, 1827(1827-04-09) 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.

Last of her gives a true picture of the Eastern way of life, well captured scenes of Palestinian life, although she never was in the East.[4]

Bibliography

(highlights, in alphabetical order ^[4][5])

• 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 0838676154
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 9780226041797
4. ^ http://www.amazon.com/s/qid=1263848353/ref=sr_pg_1?ie=UTF8&rs=&sort=relevancerank&rh=n%3A%211000%2Ci%3Astripbooks%2Cp_27%3AMaria%20Susanna%20Cummins&page=1
5. ^ http://www.enotes.com/nineteenth-century-criticism/cummins-maria-susanna

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; New York, E. P. Dutton.

External links

• The Lamplighter by Rebecca Saulsbury at the Literary Encyclopedia
• "The Lamplighter" audio book at "Librivox"
• Dorchester Atheneum : Maria Susanna Cummins - biography

Persondata
Name	Cummins, Maria Susanna
Alternative names
Short description	Novelist
Date of birth	April 9, 1827
Place of birth	Salem, Massachusetts, United States
Date of death	October 1, 1866
Place of death	Dorchester, Massachusetts, United States