Susanna Watts

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SW wrote all her life (during the later eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries): mostly in unfashionable genres, to earn much-needed income and to forward good causes. She pictured herself as a slave to publishers, fagging and scribling whole summers & winters.
Watts, Susanna. Scrapbook.
She wrote in many genres—poetry (some for children), hymns, fiction, translation, and a guide-book—as well as compiling an anthology and editing a periodical.

Milestones

2 July 1768
SW was born in Leicester, the youngest and the only survivor of at least three sisters.
Aucott, Shirley. Susanna Watts (1768 to 1842): author of Leicester’s first guide, abolitionist and bluestocking. Shirley Aucott, 2004.
6
Blain, Virginia, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy, editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
Feminist Companion Archive.
1784
Still in her teens, SW published at Leicester, with her name, her earliest identified work in print: Chinese Maxims. Translated from The Oeconomy of Human Life Into Heroic Verse.
British Library Catalogue.
By July 1804
SW published, anonymously and calling herself he in her opening Address, a guidebook: A Walk through Leicester.
Critical Review. W. Simpkin and R. Marshall.
3d ser. 2 (1804): 350
2 or 11 February 1842
SW died at her home in Leicester.
The memoir published the same year gave the date as 2 February; the death certificate says the fourth; a local newspaper said the tenth and her gravestone the eleventh.
Aucott, Shirley. Susanna Watts (1768 to 1842): author of Leicester’s first guide, abolitionist and bluestocking. Shirley Aucott, 2004.
40
Watts, Susanna. Hymns and Poems of the late Mrs. Susanna Watts. 1842.

Biography

Birth and Family

2 July 1768
SW was born in Leicester, the youngest and the only survivor of at least three sisters.
Aucott, Shirley. Susanna Watts (1768 to 1842): author of Leicester’s first guide, abolitionist and bluestocking. Shirley Aucott, 2004.
6
Blain, Virginia, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy, editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
Feminist Companion Archive.

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