author
Elizabeth Wells Gallup
1846–1933
An American educator turned literary sleuth, she became one of the best-known champions of the idea that Francis Bacon, not William Shakespeare, wrote the plays. Her books on hidden ciphers helped make the Baconian authorship debate famous with a wider public.
1 Audiobook
Concerning the bi-literal cypher of Francis Bacon discovered in his works
by Elizabeth Wells Gallup
About the author
Born in Paris, New York, Elizabeth Wells Gallup was an American teacher and school principal who later devoted much of her public life to literary controversy. Sources found for this profile consistently describe her as an educator and a leading advocate of the Baconian theory of Shakespearean authorship.
She is especially associated with the claim that secret messages were embedded in printed texts through a biliteral cipher. Her 1901 book The Bi-literal Cypher of Sir Francis Bacon became her best-known work, and she followed it with other books arguing that Bacon had concealed hidden writings in the Shakespeare canon and related works.
The dates attached to her name vary across library and reference records: some sources list her as 1848–1934, while others catalog her under 1846–1933. Because of that conflict, it is safest to say that she lived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and became a notable figure in one of literature's most persistent authorship debates.