author
Delia Salter Bacon
1811–1859
Best remembered for launching one of the earliest major challenges to Shakespeare’s authorship, this American writer built a reputation on bold ideas and fierce literary curiosity. Her life joined teaching, fiction, and scholarship, and her most famous work kept people arguing long after her death.
2 Audiobooks
The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded
by Delia Salter Bacon
The Bride of Fort Edward: Founded on an Incident of the Revolution
by Delia Salter Bacon
About the author
Born in Tallmadge, Ohio, on February 2, 1811, and raised mostly in Connecticut, Delia Salter Bacon was an American writer, teacher, and literary thinker. She taught school and later gave popular lectures on history and literature for women, building a reputation for intelligence, originality, and strong opinions.
She wrote plays and stories, but she is most widely remembered for her writings about Shakespeare. Bacon argued that the plays usually credited to William Shakespeare were actually written by a group of highly educated figures, including Francis Bacon and Sir Walter Raleigh. Her ideas were controversial in her own time and remain outside the scholarly mainstream, but they made her an important early figure in the long-running Shakespeare authorship debate.
In her later years, she traveled in England while pursuing this theory and eventually published The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded in 1857. Though her work was often criticized, it drew attention from major literary figures of the day and secured her a lasting place in literary history. She died in Hartford, Connecticut, on September 2, 1859.