Delia Bacon

Delia Salter Bacon (February 2, 1811 – September 2, 1859) was an American writer of plays and short stories and Shakespeare scholar. She is best known for her work on the authorship of Shakespeare's plays, which she attributed to social reformers including Francis Bacon (to whom she was unrelated), Sir Walter Raleigh and others. Bacon's research in Boston, New York, and London led to the publication of her major work on the subject, The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded. Her admirers included authors Harriet Beecher Stowe, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Ralph Waldo Emerson, the last of whom called her "America's greatest literary producer of the past ten years" at the time of her death. Biography Bacon was born in a frontier log cabin in Tallmadge, Ohio, the youngest daughter of Congregational minister David Bacon, who in pursuit of a vision, had abandoned New Haven for the wilds of Ohio. The venture quickly collapsed, and the family returned to New England, where her father died soon after. The impoverished state of their finances permitted only her elder brother Leonard to receive a tertiary education, at Yale, while her own formal education ended when she was fourteen. She became a teacher in schools in Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York, and then, until about 1852, became a distinguished professional lecturer, conducting, in various Eastern United States cities, classes for women in history and literature by methods she devised. At 20, in 1831, she published her first book, Tales of the Puritans anonymously, consisting of three long stories on colonial life. In 1832, she beat Edgar Allan Poe for a short-story prize sponsored by the Philadelphia Saturday Courier. In 1836, she moved to New York, and became an avid theatre-goer. She met the leading Shakespearean actress Ellen Tree soon after, and persuaded her to take the lead role in a play she was writing, partly in blank verse, entitled The Bride of Fort Edward, based on her award-winning story, Love's Martyr, about Jane M'Crea. The play, however, was never performed, due in part to Bacon's health and the harsh criticisms of her brother. It was published anonymously in 1839 (with a note claiming it was "not a play"). The text was reviewed favourably by the Saturday Courier and Edgar Allan Poe, but proved to be a commercial flop.