Born in 1813 to a well-to-do Philadelphia family, Anne Hampton Brewster was a poet, author and one of the first women correspondents. Although encouraged to write poetry by her mother as a means of private self-expression, Anne soon was publishing short stories under the pen name, Enna Duval, despite the strong disapproval of her brother. Her brother also broke up her close relationship with the actress, Charlotte Cushman–something that angered her all her life.
When her father died and her inheritance was tied up in the courts,and later by her brother, Anne set off to support herself through her writing. “Intellectual toil,” she wrote was “the only secure way of real happiness and if needed, the most pleasant way of support.”
In her lifetime, she published more than fifty short stories and three novels. The heroines in her stories often mirrored her own mindset and were hard-working and economically independent. But what she is most known for is her journalism.
In 1857, she toured Europe ending up in Italy. Taking up residency in Rome, she began writing her “Letter from Rome” for the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin and the New Jersey Courier. She eventually wrote articles on European science, arts and political events for over twelve newspapers, including the Chicago Daily News and the New York Times.
The following excerpt is from the preface to her second novel, Compensation, or Always a Future.
“I commenced it [this novel] at a season of great sadness—at a period when the very ground on which I stood seemed reeling. Old ties were rent asunder, old faiths, old hopes, all I had lived, loved and prayed for, swept away from me; links severed, never to be clasped together in this state of being. To keep my sorrow from feeding on me, I gave my ‘serpent a file.’ The world has nothing to do with all this; but my little public may look more favorably on my book-child when they know what an angel of blessing it has proved to me. It has done its duty well; it has cheered me when hopeless, given me fresh spring and impulse when failing health and morbid spirits refused their aid. Now its work is finished with me. It will go out into the world to take its chance beside lovelier and cleverer ones. I have done all I can for it in return for its good done to me. I am only sorry that my doing has been so weak.
Read More of Anne Hampton Brewster’s Work
Compensation, or Always a Future
Learn More about her Career
Anne Hampton Brewster 19th Century Author and “Social Outlaw”