Sarah Wentworth Morton

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Standard Name: Morton, Sarah Wentworth
Birth Name: Sarah Wentworth Apthorp
Married Name: Sarah Wentworth Morton
Pseudonym: Constantia
Pseudonym: Philenia
Pseudonym: Cambria
SWM , poet of the American Revolution, is remembered for the long, sentimental, narrative poems in which she considers the make-up of the new nation, inter-racial relationships (equal male friendship, unequal heterosexual love), the relationship of history to topography, and heroism both male and female. Her more personal and occasional poems, and her essays, are also of interest. Though too invested in the idea of submission to be a feminist, she has the status and role of women much at heart.
Half-length painting of Sarah Wentworth Morton by Gilbert Stuart, c. 1802. She sits in a red chair looking at the viewer in half-profile, her dark hair and dress merging into the black background and only her face, décolletage, and forearms standing out dramatically, with a gold shawl at her elbows. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Intertextuality and Influence Judith Sargent Murray
Through her title, The Gleaner, JSM conveys her sense of coming late to a field where other periodical-writers have harvested before her. She uses multiple veils for her identity. The actual name of her...
Intertextuality and Influence Judith Sargent Murray
She backs this pleasure in modernity with a remarkable grasp of former female history and of the women's literary tradition in English and its contexts. She mentions the Greek foremother Sappho , the patriotic heroism...
Publishing Judith Sargent Murray
The set was dedicated to John Adams , and subscribers included the dedicatee, many of the author's relations, Sarah Wentworth Morton and her husband , Susanna Haswell Rowson , and George and Martha Washington ....
Textual Production Judith Sargent Murray
The future JSM wrote a history (probably fiction) when she was nine, which years later she disparaged as an imbecile effusion.
Skemp, Sheila L. Judith Sargent Murray. A Brief Biography with Documents. Bedford Books, 1998.
95
As she grew up she became prolific in letters and in occasional...

Timeline

April 1782
Hester Thrale recorded in her journal a poem by Anne Hunter which seems to be the first English rendering of a Native American death song.
1800
Sally Sayward Keating (later Wood) published at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, her novelJulia and the Illuminated Baron, written some years earlier and incorporating a tribute to Sarah Wentworth Morton .