Maria Susanna Cummins

Maria Susanna Cummins (April 9, 1827 – October 1, 1866) was an American novelist. She authored the novel The Lamplighter (1854).

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
Genre	Romance, girls' books
Notable works	The Lamplighter (1854)

Biography

Maria Susanna Cummins was born in Salem, Massachusetts, on April 9, 1827. She was the daughter of David Cummins and Maria F. Kittredge, and was the eldest of four children. 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. 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).

Cummins died in Dorchester after a period of illness on October 1, 1866, aged 39.^[4]

Selected bibliography

• 1854 : The Lamplighter
• 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

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. (3 October 1866). Death of Miss Maria Cummins, The Author, The New York Times (reporting based on Boston Transcript story)

 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 – via Wikisource.

External links

• Dorchester Atheneum : Maria Susanna Cummins - biography
• Works by Maria Susanna Cummins at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Maria Susanna Cummins at the Internet Archive
• Works by Maria Susanna Cummins at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• The Lamplighter by Maria Susanna Cummins at the Internet Archive
• The Lamplighter by Rebecca Saulsbury at the Literary Encyclopedia
• "The Lamplighter" audio book at "Librivox"