Susanna Rowson’s Transatlantic Career

On April 2, 1794, Susanna Rowson, an actress and novelist recently arrived in the United States from England, placed an advertisement in the Gazette of the United States announcing to Philadelphia readers a proposal “for printing by subscription an original novel . . . Trials of the Human Heart.” The novel by which most American literary historians know Rowson, Charlotte Temple (first published in London in 1791), had not yet appeared in its first American edition; nevertheless the advertisement identifies the author of the proposed Trials of the Human Heart as “Mrs. Rowson, of the New Theatre, Philadelphia, Author of Victoria, Inquisitor, Charlotte, Fille de Chambre, &c. &c.” Further fusing her identities as actress and novelist, Rowson advises potential subscribers that, in addition to at the offices of several printers, “Subscriptions are received by the Author, the corner of Seventh and Chesnut Streets”—that is, just outside the theater where she acted in plays most nights of the week.¹

The social networks that Rowson exploited to achieve her economic and artistic aims were both local and transatlantic. Standing bodily on a street corner outside the New Theatre receiving subscriptions for her first novel authored on American soil, she sought to make herself known to a new community and to create for that community an association between herself as an author and her body of work.² Trials of the Human Heart did not issue from the presses until more than a year after the subscription proposal first appeared, but this moment in April 1794 marks the beginning of Rowson’s successful campaign to restage her careers as novelist and actress simultaneously in America. Indeed, the contention that Charlotte is best understood as part of Rowson’s career, a career that spanned a period of years and the Atlantic Ocean, is central to our analysis and to the recovery of Rowson’s authorial agency. In Women and Authorship in Revolutionary America, Angela Vietto argues for the importance of the “literary career” as a category of analysis for women, of “examinin[g] the course writers followed in their pursuit of writing as a vocation—their progress in a variety of kinds of projects, both in their texts and in their performances as authors” (91). Although we leave the work of textual analysis across the range of Rowson’s literary works to other scholars, we take up the work of recovering American’s first best-selling novel as part of a transatlantic career that Rowson herself constructed and made visible.

As a recent surge in transatlantic readings of Rowson’s work testifies,³ the facts of Rowsons’s biography make a transatlantic approach nearly inevitable. Born Susanna Haswell in England in 1762, she moved to the American colonies at the age of five and spent her childhood happily in Massachusetts until the Revolutionary War intervened. A prisoner exchange returned her Loyalist family to England in 1778. Fifteen years later, in 1793, a married Susanna Rowson embarked on her third Atlantic crossing with her husband, William, to join Thomas Wignell’s theater company in Philadelphia. As Jeffrey Richards aptly argues, Rowson’s theatrical career embodies the Anglo-American transatlanticism of the early American theater, making “Rowson . . . herself the space or hyphen between the two English-speaking cultures” (22).⁴

At the same time, Cathy Davidson’s widely disseminated work on the publishing history of Charlotte Temple has largely prevented literary historians from recognizing that Rowson herself was responsible for making her career as a novelist transatlantic by arranging for the American republication of her novels first published in London. While Davidson focuses primarily on American readers of Charlotte in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, she also presents a seemingly authoritative account of how Mathew Carey came to issue the first American edition of Charlotte in 1794. Although the details of her several accounts differ, Davidson consistently represents Susanna Rowson as entirely uninvolved in the reprinting, a victim of the clever and entrepreneurial Carey, a notorious book “pirate” who took advantage of the then fledgling and inadequate American copyright law to steal and profit from her work. Rowson was...