Maria S. (Maria Susanna) Cummins

Born in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1827, Maria Susanna Cummins grew up in a well-to-do family and spent much of her life in Dorchester, near Boston. She wrote during a period when domestic fiction was reaching a wide readership, and she became one of the notable voices in that tradition.

Her greatest success was The Lamplighter, published in 1854. The novel became a bestseller in the United States and abroad, giving her an unusually large audience for the time. She went on to publish other fiction as well, including Mabel Vaughan, El Fureidis, and Haunted Hearts.

Cummins died in 1866 at the age of 39. Though she is remembered above all for The Lamplighter, her career offers a vivid glimpse of how influential popular women writers could be in 19th-century American literary life.