Susanna Rowson

Childhood

Susanna Haswell was born in 1762 in Portsmouth, England to Royal Navy Lieutenant William Haswell and his first wife, Susanna Musgrave, who died within days of Susanna's birth. While stationed in Boston her father remarried to Rachel Woodward and started a second family, and after his ship returned to Portsmouth and was decommissioned, he obtained an appointment as a Boston customs officer, bringing his daughter and a servant with him to Massachusetts. On arrival in 1767, their ship grounded on Lovells Island in Boston Harbor, the crew and passengers being rescued from the wreck days later. They lived at Nantasket (now Hull), where family friend James Otis took a special interest in Susanna's education. At the outbreak of the American Revolution, Lieutenant Haswell was placed under house arrest, and subsequently the family was moved inland, to Hingham and Abington, Massachusetts. In 1778, his failing health led to a prisoner exchange, and the family was sent via Halifax, Nova Scotia to England, eventually settling near Kingston upon Hull. Their American property was confiscated and they lived in relative poverty, being forced to sell the Portsmouth property left Susanna by her grandfather in order to support the family.

Pen and stage

It was as a governess living in Westminster that she wrote her first work, Victoria, dedicated to the Duchess of Devonshire and published in 1786. On 17 October of the same year she married William Rowson, a hardware merchant who came from a theatrical family as well as reportedly being a Royal Horse Guards trumpeter. In 1791, she published the novel now referred to as Charlotte Temple; it became the first American best-selling novel. This popular story of seduction and remorse has gone through more than 200 editions. The novel sparked much controversy, both over its content and whether it could actually be considered a novel due to its minimal number of pages.

After William's hardware business failed and his father died in 1791, he and Susanna took in his orphaned sister Charlotte Rowson and they all turned to acting, William appearing as a member of the company of the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, while Susanna joined the Theatre Royal, Edinburgh. In 1793, the three Rowsons were recruited for the Philadelphia theatre company of Thomas Wignell, also performing with them in Baltimore.

Over the next three years in Philadelphia she wrote a novel, an opera, a musical farce about the Whiskey Rebellion (The Volunteers), a poetical address to the American troops, and several songs for the company in addition to performing 57 roles on the stage in two seasons. Rowson's work as a playwright and actor encouraged the growth of Performance Art in the United States. In response to her seemingly new-found republicanism and the liberal gender roles in her work, Slaves in Algiers, she was attacked by William Cobbett, who referred to her as "our American Sappho" (she returned fire, calling him a "loathsome reptile" in her introduction to Trials of the Human Heart).

Later years

In 1796, Susanna reestablished contact with her old Edinburgh director, John Brown Williamson. He had taken over the Federal Street Theatre in Boston, and the Rowson trio relocated there in part to be closer to the more familiar residence of her youth and her core American literary fan-base. The bankruptcy and major restructuring of the Boston theatre in 1797 would have sent Susanna and William to Charleston, but after a few summer performances in Newport and Providence, Rhode Island, they opted to give up the stage instead. William clerked for a Boston merchant who went bankrupt, and having co-signed bonds, he was briefly imprisoned for his employer's debt. He was then hired at the Boston Custom House and there was employed for almost four decades. On leaving the stage, Susanna founded a boarding school for girls in Boston. Desiring a more rural setting, she would move her school to Medford, then to Newton, Massachusetts, before returning it to Boston in 1809. In all she trained hundreds of girls. She also continued her writings, producing several novels, an additional work for the stage, a dictionary and two geographies as well as being contributor to the Boston Weekly Magazine (1802–1805). Her educational and literary work helped provide support for a growing household. Having no children of their own, they took in her husband's illegitimate son William, two adopted daughters, Frances Maria Mills, the orphaned daughter of an actor, and Susanna Rowson Johnston, her niece, who was daughter of Charlotte Rowson, and sister of artist David Claypoole Johnston, plus she hosted the widow and daughters of her half-brother, Robert Haswell, who had been lost at sea in 1801. (One of these nieces, Rebecca Haswell, who would marry Roxbury mayor John Jones Clarke, becoming great-grandmother of poet E. E. Cummings.) Susanna also headed a charity for widows and the fatherless. She retired from her school in 1822, passing its operation to her adopted daughters, and she died in Boston two years later, 2 March 1824. She was buried in the family vault of friend Gottlieb Graupner at St. Matthew's Church, South Boston. When this church was demolished in 1866, the indistinguishable remains in the vault were all moved together to the Mount Hope Cemetery. A cenotaph was later erected for Susanna Haswell Rowson and her brothers Robert and John Montresor Haswell at Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston's Jamaica Plain neighborhood, where she is memorialized as the author of Charlotte Temple.

Fiction

Plays

Verse

Other