Love And Romance: Charlotte And Lucy Temple (1870)
(This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)
This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.
(This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)
This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.
Reuben and Rachel: or, A Tale of Old Times (Broadview Editions)
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Susanna Haswell Rowson, a popular and prolific writer,...)
Susanna Haswell Rowson, a popular and prolific writer, actress, and educator in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, had a truly transatlantic life and career, moving twice from England to America and publishing extensively in both countries. A transatlantic sensibility informs her fictionalized “history” of America, Reuben and Rachel, which traces ten generations of an extended family, beginning with the marriage of Christopher Columbus’s son to a native Peruvian princess, moving through the Tudor succession crises and the colonial settlement of New England, and ending with the title characters, who leave England for America, renounce titles of nobility, and consider their children “true-born Americans.” In Rowson’s representation, the American character derives from fusion and hybridity, the results of intermarriage across racial, religious and national lives.
(Through a disguised approach, Rowson paints the real worl...)
Through a disguised approach, Rowson paints the real world where the women have to suffer in each and every field. From relationships to the outside world, being daughters and being mothers, she gives voice to the under-privileged and insecure woman. Following the life of protagonist she narrates the many traps she escapes, and her efforts for survival. Thought-provoking!
Susanna Haswell Rowson was a British-American novelist, actress and educator. She was a founder of the boarding school for girls in Boston.
Background
Susanna Haswell Rowson was born in Portsmouth, England, of a family which produced several British and American naval officers and at least two other authors, her cousin Anthony Haswell and her brother, Lieut. Robert Haswell (F. W. Howay, Washington Historical Quarterly, April 1933). Her mother, Susanna Musgrave (or Musgrove), died giving birth to her daughter. When the child was about five, her father, Lieut. William Haswell, who was stationed in Massachusetts and had remarried there, returned to England for her; and the clearest recollection of her childhood was that of the stormy passage, ending in shipwreck, vividly narrated in her novel Rebecca. Her girlhood was happily spent at her father's home in Nantasket, where at ten she surprised their summer neighbor, James Otis, by her familiarity with Spenser, Shakespeare, and Homer and Virgil in Pope's and Dryden's translations. In 1775 her father's estate was confiscated and his family interned at Hingham and later Abington, until he was exchanged in 1778 and they all returned to England.
Career
In 1786, encouraged by the success of Fanny Burney and Harriet and Sophia Lee, Rowson published her first novel, Victoria, dedicated to the Duchess of Devonshire and favorably noticed (January 1787) by the Critical Review and the Monthly Review.
Her next few works, The Inquisitor or Invisible Rambler (1788), Poems on Various Subjects (1788), and Mary, or the Test of Honour (1789), added little to her reputation. But early in 1791 (Vail, post) she produced the novel, Charlotte, a Tale of Truth, which was to make her famous.
Mentoria, or the Young Lady's Friend, a collection of didactic tales and essays, came later in 1791, followed by Rebecca, or the Fille de Chambre (1792), largely autobiographical and second-best among her novels despite its disorderly plot. In 1792 William Rowson failed, and the family turned for support to the stage, in which Mrs. Rowson had already shown her interest by the versified critique, A Trip to Parnassus (1788).
In the winter season of 1792-93 the Rowsons played in Edinburgh and other cities but were stranded when Thomas Wignell, recruiting in England for his company at the New Chestnut Street Theatre, Philadelphia, met and engaged them. From the end of 1793 to 1796 they acted, mostly in minor parts, in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Annapolis. For the Philadelphia company, Mrs. Rowson wrote Slaves in Algiers, acted June 30, 1794, and the musical farce The Volunteers, January 21, 1795, and adapted Massinger's The Bondman as The Female Patriot, June 19, 1795.
Her appeal to contemporary interest and to American patriotic sentiment (shown in these plays and in her verse address, "The Standard of Liberty, " recited at Baltimore, Oct. 29, 1795) aroused her fellow-countryman, William Cobbett, to a coarse satire, A Kick for a Bite (1795), that led her to allude to him in the preface to Trials of the Human Heart, published later in the same year, as "a kind of loathsome reptile. "
In 1796 the Rowsons went to the Federal Street Theatre, Boston, for which Mrs. Rowson wrote a comedy, Americans in England (1796), first presented on April 19, 1797, and later assigned to John Hodgkinson, who performed it as The Columbian Daughter, or Americans in England.
In the spring of 1797 she left the stage to devote the rest of her life to conducting a select school for young ladies in or near Boston. In this career she was notably successful, furnishing her pupils with musical training under competent foreign instructors and infusing them with her own fine qualities of character. She did not relinquish her interest in letters, serving from 1802 to 1805 as editor of the Boston Weekly Magazine, to which she contributed in serial form her novel "Sincerity" (separately published as Sarah, the Exemplary Wife in 1813), poems, and the greater part of an essay series, "The Gossip. "
After 1805 she continued to write for the magazine's successor, The Boston Magazine, for The Monthly Anthology and Boston Review, and J. T. Buckingham's New England Galaxy. A collection of her poems and songs, more than thirty of the latter were separately published between 1794 and 1824, was issued as Miscellaneous Poems (1804).
Reuben and Rachel, a very poorly organized historical novel tracing the fortune of certain descendants of Christopher Columbus through three centuries and numerous countries, appeared in 1798. Another novel, left in manuscript at her death and printed in 1828 as Charlotte's Daughter, or The Three Orphans, is a sequel to Charlotte Temple, in which Lucy, Charlotte's illegitimate daughter, narrowly escapes an incestuous marriage with her half-brother, a theme perhaps suggested by William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy (1789) and Ira and Isabella (1807). More than thirty editions, mostly under the title Lucy Temple, were issued.
Most of her later publications, however, were textbooks or monitory works for young women. In her later life she was able to contribute to many philanthropic enterprises, serving as president of the Boston Fatherless and Widows Society. She died in her house in Hollis Street, Boston, March 2, 1824.
In 1786 Rowson married William Rowson, then in the hardware business in London and trumpeter in the Royal Horse Guards, a personable young man and a fair musician but of no great stability of character. Herself childless, Mrs. Rowson devoted a mother's care successively to her husband's younger sister, Charlotte; to his illegitimate son, William; and to at least one adopted daughter. William Rowson survived her and remarried, dying at Boston in 1842.