Susanna Musgrove Haswell Rowson, destined to be one of the founding mothers of American literature, was born in Portsmouth, England, in 1762; she was taken to America in 1767 but returned to England in 1778. In 1793, with her husband, William Rowson, she moved to America for good and began a long and successful career-first in Philadelphia, then in the Boston area-as an actress, author, and feminist educator. She died in 1828. Among her most popular works were the novels Rebecca; or, The Fille de Chambre (1792), Charlotte Temple (1791 [England]; 1794 [America]), Charlotte's Daughter; or, The Three Orphans (1828), the play Slaves in Algiers (1794), and the song "America, Commerce, and Freedom."
Ann Douglas is Parr Professor Emerita of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She is the author of The Feminization of American Culture, as well as many articles and reviews on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American culture.