Judith Sargent Murray

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Standard Name: Murray, Judith Sargent
Birth Name: Judith Sargent
Married Name: Judith Stevens
Married Name: Judith Murray
Pseudonym: Constantia
Pseudonym: The Gleaner
Pseudonym: Mr Gleaner
Pseudonym: Mr Vigillius
Pseudonym: Honora
Pseudonym: Honora-Martesia
Pseudonym: A Citizen of the United States
JSM , writing around and after the American War of Independence, produced poetry, plays, periodical essays, and a sentimental novel published in instalments. A recent biographer puts her closer to the centre of debate about women's role in the new American republic than Mercy Otis Warren or Abigail Adams .
Skemp, Sheila L. Judith Sargent Murray. A Brief Biography with Documents. Bedford Books, 1998.
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Photograph of a three-quarter-length painting of Judith Sargent Murray by John Singleton Copley. Her pale skin and white satin dress contrast strongly with her her black shawl and dark background. She is seated, looking directly at the viewer though her body is turned a little away. Her right knee is raised; her elbows rest on the arms of her chair, and her right hand holds a basket of flowers. Her dark hair is pulled back and ornamented with a ribbon.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Publishing Sarah Wentworth Morton
She may already have contributed to other, earlier magazines as well.
Pendleton, Emily, and Milton Ellis. Philenia. University of Maine Press, 1931.
41
Her contemporary Judith Sargent Murray had already been using the name Constantia for about five years, which was no doubt why Morton switched...
Textual Features Susanna Wright
It argues (before such arguments had been put forward in America by Abigail Adams , Judith Sargent Murray , or Mercy Otis Warren , but drawing on beliefs current among Quakers since their mid-seventeenth-century origins)...

Timeline

15 September 1790
Judith Sargent Murray , visiting Connecticut from Massachusetts, reported the ease of divorce in the former: if a couple were unhappy together, the state legislature would provide a bill to divorce them.
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 .