The First American Bestseller — Susanna Rowson

The classroom is a parlor with the furniture moved. The globe sits on a side shelf. The wall map shows South America. At the front of the room a woman in her fifties holds a piece of chalk and asks twenty girls to name the capitals. The textbook they are reading from is the one she wrote because no adequate one existed. On the shelf in the back of the room, between a spelling dictionary and a geography primer she also wrote, sits a small pocket-sized novel with a worn paper cover. It has sold a hundred thousand copies. She does not mention it.

It is 1815.

She does not just write a novel. She writes the book that a generation of American women reads in secret and in public, passes from hand to hand until the covers fall off, and believes so completely that readers travel to a churchyard in Manhattan to leave flowers on a grave that does not exist, for a woman who never did.

She does not just perform on stage. She plays one hundred and twenty-nine parts in five years across Philadelphia and Boston, writes her own plays, and leaves the theatre in 1797 not because she fails but because she has something more durable in mind.

She does not just open a school. She runs the Young Ladies’ Academy for twenty-five years, refuses to limit her students to embroidery and French, and teaches them geography, history, rhetoric, composition, and public speaking from textbooks she writes herself when the published ones are not good enough.

She does not just publish a book that becomes a bestseller. She publishes a book that is called a tale of truth, and the country takes her at her word for sixty years.

Her Spark of Liberty was the story told as if it mattered.

She believed that a woman’s life — its danger, its limit, its consequence — was a subject serious enough for literature, and she wrote it down at a time when the critics who ran the canon disagreed, which is why the canon got it wrong for two hundred years.

Now, “Where History Comes to Life.”

Born in Portsmouth, England, around February 1762, she emigrated to Massachusetts as a child and was sent back to England when her family was interned during the Revolution. She married William Rowson in 1786, debuted on the Edinburgh stage in 1792, and returned to America in 1793 to perform at the Chestnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia. Her novel Charlotte: A Tale of Truth, published in London in 1791, was republished by Mathew Carey in Philadelphia in 1794 under the title Charlotte Temple. It sold through more than two hundred editions over the next century and remained the most widely read American novel until Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852. It was not the first American novel — that distinction belongs to William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy, published in 1789 — but it was the first American bestseller, which is a harder and more durable thing to be. She left the stage in 1797, founded the Young Ladies’ Academy of Boston, and ran it until 1822. She died in Boston on March 2, 1824.

Her name was Susanna Haswell Rowson.

Now We Know Em
by Christopher B. Gordon

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