Education
She was given an unusual education for her day and was reared in the traditions of cultured ancestors, her grandfathers having been wealthy and distinguished merchants of Boston.
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Sarah Morton
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Career
In 1789 the newly established Massachusetts Magazine enlisted Mrs. Morton's support, and a number of her moralizing or eulogistic lyrics appeared in the issues of the next four years, mostly over her pseudonym "Philenia. "
Her first published volume, Ouâbi, or the Virtues of Nature, an Indian Tale (Boston, 1790), an idealized narrative on the "noble savage" theme, in stilted Popean couplets, was well received in America and in England (Monthly Review, September 1793, pp. 72-77), where James Bacon used its plot for his play, The American Indian (1795).
Her poems continued to appear in the Boston Columbian Centinel, the New York Magazine, Joseph Dennie's Tablet, and other papers; and "Philenia" became the object of extravagant praise by such contemporary critics as Dennie and Thomas Paine (later Robert Treat Paine, Jr. ), who eulogized her as the "American Sappho" and the "American Mrs. Montague. "
A portion of her most ambitious undertaking, a versified account of the Revolution, was published in 1797 as Beacon Hill, a Local Poem, Historical and Descriptive.
In 1802 Mrs. Morton visited Washington and Philadelphia, where Stuart painted for her three of his finest portraits, though the third was never finished.
Her verses, called forth by various national and local events and causes, still appeared, some as broadsides, some in the Port Folio and the Monthly Anthology, and others in the newspapers.
Her fame had considerably declined by 1823, however, when she published her miscellany of short didactic prose pieces and fugitive lyrics, with autobiographical notes, under the title My Mind and Its Thoughts.
The real author was probably the Mortons' neighbor, William Hill Brown (1765 - 1793), a minor novelist, playwright, poet, and essayist.
[See Emily Pendleton and Milton Ellis, Philenia, the Life and Works of Sarah Wentworth Morton (1931), University of Maine Studies, 2nd ser. , no. 20.
The evidence indicating Brown's authorship of The Power of Sympathy is summed up in Milton Ellis, "The Authorship of the First American Novel, " Am.
Lit. , Jan. 1933, pp. 359-68.
The novel has been twice reprinted: by Walter Littlefield in 1894, with an introduction attributing it to Mrs. Morton; and serially in the Bostonian, Oct. 1894-June 1895, accompanied by an article, Dec. 1894, "The Real Author of The Power of Sympathy, " by A. W. Brayley, in which Brown's authorship was first asserted. ]
Religion
A second part appeared as The Virtues of Society (1799), but the work, if completed, was never published in entirety.
Politics
After their marriage, Feb. 24, 1781, they occupied the Apthorp family mansion on State Street, where their five children were probably born and where they lived on intimate terms with the families of Governor Bowdoin and Vice-President Adams.
Connections
In 1797 the family moved to a house of Mrs. Morton's designing in Dorchester, and thence about 1808 to another residence called "the Pavilion, " where in later years she and her husband, now attorney-general of Massachusetts, enjoyed the society of many distinguished guests.
Soon after her husband's death, Oct. 14, 1837, she moved to her old Braintree home, by that time in the town of Quincy, where she died, aged eighty-six, having outlived her children and all of her near relatives.
The sole reason for this attribution appears to be that an episode in the novel was based upon a scandal involving Mrs. Morton's husband and her sister.
