Maria Susanna Cummins (April 9, 1827 – October 1, 1866) was an American novelist. She authored the novel 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.
In 1854, she published the novel The Lamplighter. One reviewer called it "one of the most original and natural narratives".Riegel, Robert Edgar. American Women: A Story of Social Change. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1970: 166. Within eight weeks, it sold 40,000 copies and totaled 70,000 by the end of its first year in print.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. She wrote other books, including Mabel Vaughan (1857).
Cummins died in Dorchester after a period of illness on October 1, 1866, aged 39.(3 October 1866). Death of Miss Maria Cummins, The Author , The New York Times (reporting based on Boston Transcript story)
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
External links Dorchester Atheneum : Maria Susanna Cummins - biography
The Lamplighter by The Lamplighter by Rebecca Saulsbury at the Literary Encyclopedia "The Lamplighter" audio book at "Librivox"