John Murray

The itinerant minister John Murray (an English immigrant who had been preaching in the USA since 1770), arrived at Gloucester,Massachusetts (home town of Judith Sargent Stevens ), to spread the gospel of Universalism .

The thirty-seven-year-old Judith Stevens , after a year and a half as a widow, married the Rev. John Murray , the man who had converted her to Universalism.

John Murray , husband of JSM , died at Boston, six years after his disabling stroke.

She wrote this book for the two foster-daughters she raised during her first marriage. Her mother urged her to send the manuscript to the Universalist minister Noah Parker of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Parker urged her...

Once again the play was ascribed to John Murray , and again he publicly denied his authorship. The audience was enthusiastic, but a bad review by Robert Treat Paine made The Traveller Returned controversial.

The year after her husband's death, JSM completed, edited, and published, as Records of the Life of the Rev. John Murray, the autobiography which he had left unfinished. It was her final literary work.

This was the first American play staged in Boston, and it was handicapped by the fact that substitutes, at least one of them under-rehearsed, appeared in two of the female lead roles. Rumour ascribed its...