Mercy Otis Warren

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Standard Name: Warren, Mercy Otis
MOW has been called First Lady of the American Revolution. She was its historian—the only writer to fill this role at an early date from anything like a revolutionary point of view—but she was also a participator in the ideological power-struggles of the day. She wrote political pamphlets, poetry, and plays: both idealistic republican tragedies and hard-hitting satires. In short, she was a woman of letters of commanding stature.
Painting of Mercy Otis Warren by John Singleton Copley. She stands in an outdoor background of trees and flowers, holding one hand out, and wearing a deep blue gown with quantities of lace at the wrists, frills and more lace elsewhere, and a silver bow in the centre of the bodice. She has a lacy white cap tied with a silver ribbon on her brown hair.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Family and Intimate relationships Catharine Macaulay
Mercy Otis Warren seems to have been alone in making the feminist point of contrasting such attitudes with the acceptance of marriages between, for instance, a seventy-year-old man and fifteen-year-old girl. Later reports accused Graham...
Friends, Associates Catharine Macaulay
With her husband CM lived a busy social life. She met Frances Sheridan after she had become a writer.
Hill, Bridget. The Republican Virago: The Life and Times of Catharine Macaulay, Historian. Clarendon Press, 1992.
14
She subscribed to Elizabeth Carter 's translation of Epictetus . Of her radical friends Thomas Hollis
Friends, Associates Catharine Macaulay
She later corresponded with Washington, as well as with Abigail Adams and Mercy Otis Warren .
Hill, Bridget. The Republican Virago: The Life and Times of Catharine Macaulay, Historian. Clarendon Press, 1992.
126-8
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...
Leisure and Society Sarah Wentworth Morton
Late in 1784 SWM and her husband joined a newly-launched Boston group called the Sans Souci Club , which turned out to be a social mis-step. The club's members included Mercy Warren and other eminently...
Literary responses Catharine Macaulay
Female historians have evinced more interest in CM than male historians, but their evaluations have often been tinged with condescension or qualified with mockery. Women mentioning her have included Alicia Lefanu in 1824, Dorothy Gardiner
Author summary Judith Sargent Murray
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...
Textual Features Lydia Maria Child
LMC 's The Rebels, which appeared the year after Hobomok, is another historical novel set in colonial New England. The central, fictional stories are those of Grace Osborne and Lucretia Fitzherbert (an...
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)...
Textual Features Susanna Haswell Rowson
Contents include lives of Elizabeth Singer Rowe and of Mary Wollstonecraft (the latter reprinted from the Monthly Visitor of London). Among the poems (some of them specifically attributed to SHR ) are one entitled...
Textual Production Sarah Wentworth Morton
A large collection of SWM 's manuscripts is held by the Huntington Library in California. They include some markedly different versions of poems published in My Mind and its Thoughts (like an ode addressed...
Textual Production Abigail Adams
AA 's surviving letters include those she addressed her husband from their home in Massachusetts during his absences first on legal and then on national business (of which the latter often discuss political and economic...
Textual Production Catharine Macaulay
CM thought of writing a history of the American War of Independence. According to Mary Hays in Female Biography, she possessed materials communicated to her by Washington himself, but that the decline in her...
Textual Production Catharine Macaulay
There is no extensive collection of manuscripts by CM , but letters by her are held in various libraries in the USA: the Rhode Island Historical Society , the Boston Public Library , the...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Judith Sargent Murray
Constantia's Preface to the Reader of the collected volumes, dated 16 March 1797 and signed with her female pseudonym,
Murray, Judith Sargent. The Gleaner. I. Thomas and E. T. Andrews, 1798, 3 vols.
1: ix
says she is a lover of humanity, and that her ruling passion [is]...

Timeline

October 1789: Noah Webster, in the Massachusetts Magazine,...

Building item

October 1789

Noah Webster , in the Massachusetts Magazine, called for an American national spelling; Mercy Otis Warren was one of the first writers to answer this call.
Bly, Antonio T. “The ’Book’ in the Atlantic World”. Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol.
34
, No. 4, 1 June 2001– 2024, pp. 638-41.
639-40

Texts

Warren, Mercy Otis. History of the Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution. Printed by Manning and Loring for E. Larkin, 1805, 3 vols.
Warren, Mercy Otis. Observations on the New Constitution, and on the Federal and State Conventions. 1788.
Warren, Mercy Otis. Poems, Dramatic and Miscellaneous. I. Thomas and E.T. Andrews , 1790.
Warren, Mercy Otis. The Adulateur. New Printing Office, 1773.
Warren, Mercy Otis. The Blockheads; or, The Affrighted Officers. Printed in Queen-street, 1776.
Warren, Mercy Otis. The Group. Edes and Gill, 1775.
Warren, Mercy Otis. The Group. John Anderson, 1775.
Warren, Mercy Otis. The Motley Assembly. Nathaniel Coverly, 1779.