Susanna Haswell Rowson

Susanna Haswell Rowson (b. February 1762–d. 2 March 1824) was America’s first best-selling novelist and a groundbreaking feminist playwright, songwriter, poet, and educator. Her sentimental seduction novel Charlotte Temple has gone through more than two hundred editions since its first publication in England in 1791 and America in 1794. The popularity of this novel about a teenage English girl seduced by a soldier in England and abandoned to die in America inspired generations of readers to visit the supposed grave of the protagonist in New York’s Trinity Churchyard, where they wept and paid respects. Yet, the novel and Rowson received little scholarly attention until their rediscovery by feminist critics in the 1980s. Rowson was born in Portsmouth, England, to Susanna Musgrave Haswell and British Royal Navy officer William Haswell. She joined her widowed father at his post in Massachusetts in 1763, but colonial suspicions led to the family’s three-year house arrest until a prisoner exchange in 1778 returned them to England, where at some point she began acting and writing song lyrics and fiction. In 1786, she published her first novel by subscription and married William Rowson, a minor actor and musician. In the next ten years, Rowson published five more novels, one book of poetry, and an ode about contemporary English drama while continuing to act. In 1793, the Rowsons were recruited to join a new theater company in Philadelphia, so she returned to America. In 1794, her politically charged play Slaves in Algiers ignited a pamphlet war to which Rowson contributed in the preface to her first novel written in America. In 1796, the Rowsons moved to Boston, where Susanna continued to act and write lyrics for the theater. She republished four novels first published in England, including Charlotte Temple, which became much more popular in America. Rowson retired from the stage in 1798 after publishing her only historical novel and opened an academy for young women that she oversaw until her retirement in 1824. During that time, she published a second book of poetry, a novel that appeared serially in the Boston Weekly Magazine and was later published in book form, and five pedagogical books on spelling, history, geography, women’s biography, and the Bible. After her death in 1824, a sequel to Charlotte Temple was found among her effects and was posthumously published in 1828.