Born in Salem, Massachusetts, on April 9, 1827, Maria Cummins was educated at home and at a fashionable girls╒ school in Lenox, Massachusetts. She thereafter lived all her life with her family in Dorchester, Massachusetts. She became interested in writing during her schooldays, and the publication of some of her early short stories encouraged her. In 1854 she published her first novel, The Lamplighter, which was a huge and immediate success, selling 40,000 copies in a few weeks and 70,000 in a year. The Lamplighter combined sentimentality, piety, and improbability in about equal portions and was perfectly suited to the rudimentary taste of a newly awakened reading public. It was the book to which Nathaniel Hawthorne was specifically referring in his famous complaint that ╥America is now wholly given over to a d╤╤d mob of scribbling women.╙ English, French, and German editions were equally successful; the book had few peers as a literary phenomenon. Maria Cummins╒s later novels, Mabel Vaughan, 1857, El Fureidis, 1860, and Haunted Hearts, 1864, showed progress in technique but failed to achieve the popularity of her first. Maria Cummins died in Dorchester, Massachusetts, on October 1, 1866.
