American authoress, born at Medfield, MA, in 1755. She was probably the first woman in America who took to authorship as a means of livelihood. Her pen was fertile in religious and historic works, of which A View of Religious Opinions (1784) is the one with which her name is more generally associated at the present day. Simple to a degree in habits, and circumscribed as her travels were to points within a radius of 10 miles of her native village, she yet made many friends. She died at Brookline, MA, on the 15th of November 1832, and hers was the first body interred in Mount Auburn cemetery. See also “Nathan Hale and John André,” “A Literary Woman in the Last Century”; Literary Criticism.
