author
Mrs. Rowson
1762–1824
A novelist, playwright, actress, and teacher, she is best remembered for Charlotte Temple, one of the earliest American bestsellers. Her life crossed England and the young United States, and her writing often mixed feeling, moral warning, and a strong interest in women's education.
1 Audiobook
Charlotte Temple
by Mrs. Rowson
About the author
Born Susanna Haswell around 1762 in Portsmouth, England, she later became known as Susanna Rowson after marrying William Rowson. Her life moved between Britain and North America, and those shifts shaped a career that was unusually varied: she worked as an actress, wrote novels, plays, poems, and songs, and eventually became an educator in Boston.
She is most famous for Charlotte Temple (1791), a sentimental novel that became enormously popular in the United States and remained widely read for decades. Rowson also wrote other fiction and dramatic works, and she has been noted as an early supporter of female education.
Later in life, she ran a school for young women in Boston, where teaching became as important to her as writing. That combination of literary success, stage experience, and educational work makes her a striking figure in early American cultural history.