Delia Bacon (1811–1859)

Delia Salter Bacon was born in the community of Tallmadge, on the Ohio frontier, the daughter of a missionary. When she was six years old, the family moved back East. Delia was educated at the private school for girls in Hartford, Connecticut, run by Catharine Beecher, where she was a classmate of the young Harriet Beecher Stowe, After leaving school, Delia tried and failed to open her own school, and suffered from continuing ill-health. At age 20, she wrote and published a book of short stories called Tales of the Puritans, and at age 28 she published a play, The Bride of Fort Edward. She won a $100 prize for her short story "Love's Matyr" from the Philadelphia Saturday Courier (beating out a little-known writer from Baltimore named Edgar Allen Poe). She began a modestly successful career giving lectures to women's groups on history and culture. At this time, she became involved in a disasterous love affair with a younger man, the Rev. Alexander MacWhorter, the son of a wealthy New Jersey family. A humiliating public court case over this relationship caused Delia to retire from the lecture circuit and read. She read the plays of William Shakespeare and became convinced they had been written by Francis Bacon, Sir Walter Raleigh, Edmund Spenser, and others. Support from Ralph Waldo Emerson enabled her to travel in 1853 to England, where she met the historian Thomas Carlyle. In 1857, on the recommendation of Nathaniel Hawthorne, her work, The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded, appeared in print. Delia had by then become a recluse, and her mind deteriorated. She slipped in and out of fevers, and became suicidal. Eventually her family arranged for her return to the USA, where she died in an asylum.