Charlotte Temple

Susanna Haswell Rowson was a British-American novelist, poet, playwright, actress, educator, and advocate of women's education. Born in Portsmouth, England, in 1762, she spent part of her childhood in Massachusetts before the American Revolution forced her family back to Britain. Her varied life as writer, performer, teacher, and school founder gave her a deep interest in the moral, social, and educational pressures placed on women, especially young women vulnerable to persuasion, poverty, and reputation.Rowson's best-known work, Charlotte Temple, became one of the most popular novels of the early American republic and remained in print through many editions. Its success made her one of the most important early women writers in American literary history, while its themes of seduction, abandonment, female vulnerability, and social judgment placed it at the center of the sentimental and cautionary fiction of its age. Rowson's broader career also included plays, poetry, educational writing, religious writing, and work in geography, making her a notable figure in the cultural and literary life of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.