Susanna Haswell Rowson

Susanna Haswell Rowson was an Anglo-American novelist, dramatist, poet, essayist, and editor who lived from 1762 to 1824. She was in fact one of the first women to write professionally in the United States, and her novel, Charlotte: A Tale of Truth was highly popular. She was born in England and accompanied her father, a British naval officer, to Massachusetts for a time before being forced to return to England. She worked as a governess and wrote four novels before returning to America in 1793, married and now a professional actress. She continued her career on the stage as a dramatist and wrote a number of topical and patriotic pieces. She opened a girls' boarding school in Boston and spent the rest of her life as an educator.

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cour) who controlled her economic future (Davidson xii). Exploitation of one group by the unscrupulous is a long-standing subject of fiction and reflects certain value judgments which are timeless. The overall impact of a story such as Charlotte Temple reflects values of import today, such as concern for the oppressed, anger at those who would exploit them, and a sense of indignation at the injustices of life. These types of values do indeed extend beyond their original time and are applicable today. It is not clear that these values emerge well from a book such as this because the whole package is so wrapped in the religious and social pieties of the time, precepts which seem more quaint than cogent and which as they are stated sound as if they come from another time and from a society more prone to impose discipline and control than is our own. Rowson is given to including such homilies as she believes will shape her readers into well-behaved and moral people, and she is always ready to sublimate individual preferences and modes of expression in the service of a moral principle, such as the following: Pleasure is a vain illusion; she draws you on to a thousand follies, errors, and I may say vices, and then leaves you to d
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Approximate Word count = 1533
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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