Sarah Wentworth Apthorp Morton

Portrait of Sarah Wentworth Apthorp Morton, ca.1802, by Gilbert Stuart (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

Sarah Wentworth Apthorp Morton (1759-May 14, 1846) was an American poet.

She was born in Boston to a successful merchant family (descended from Charles Apthorp). In 1781, she was married to Boston lawyer Perez Morton at Trinity Church, Boston, and the couple lived on a family mansion on State Street. The marriage began to deteriorate by 1788, however, when an affair between Perez and Sarah's sister Frances (Fanny) became public. The family backlash led to Frances' suicide. The couple were later reconciled, but Sarah lost three of the five children she carried.

In 1796, the couple moved to Dorchester. From an early age, Sarah had begun writing poetry, but until 1788 her works had only circulated among her friends. She began publishing under the pen name Philenia, and her first book was printed in 1790. Her work was widely acclaimed, with Robert Treat Paine, Jr., in the Massachusetts Magazine dubbing her the "American Sappho". In 1792, she wrote an anti-slavery poem entitled "The African Chief", which was, in fact, an elegy on a slain African at St. Domingo in 1791.

At one time she was thought to be the author of The Power of Sympathy (1789), but that has since been attributed to William Hill Brown.

Bibliography

• Ouâbi: or the Virtues of Nature. An Indian Tale in Four Cantos, 1790.
• The African Chief, 1792.
• Beacon Hill. A Local Poem, 1797.
• The Virtues of Society. A Tale Founded on Fact, 1799.
• My Mind and Its Thoughts, in Sketches, Fragments, and Essays, 1823.

External links

• Sarah Wentworth Morton (1759-1846), The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Houghton Mifflin.
• Sarah Wentworth Apthorp Morton, 1759-1846, Dorchester Atheneum.
• Gilbert Stuart: Sarah Wentworth Apthorp Morton (Mrs. Perez Morton), 1802–20, Worchester Art.
•  "Morton, George". Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography. 1900. 

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Name	Morton, Sarah Wentworth
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Date of birth	1759
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Date of death	1846
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