Born in Gloucester, Massachusetts, on May 1, 1751, Judith Sargent was the daughter of a wealthy shipowner and merchant and received an unusually good education for a girl of her time. In October 1769 she married John Stevens, a sea captain. She began writing in the 1770s, at first in verse but soon afterward in essay form, as the intellectual ferment of the Revolutionary period awakened thoughts on woman╒s place and rights. In 1784, under the pseudonym ╥Constantia,╙ she published a few essays in a Boston magazine, the Gentleman and Lady╒s Town and Country Magazine, beginning with one called ╥Desultory Thoughts upon the Utility of Encouraging a Degree of Self-Complacency, Especially in Female Bosoms.╙ Her husband died in 1786, and in October 1788 she married John Murray, pastor of the first Universalist meetinghouse in America, of whom the Sargent family had been among the earliest supporters.
In 1790 her poems began appearing in the Massachusetts Magazine, and from February 1792 to August 1794 she contributed a monthly column entitled ╥The Gleaner,╙ in which she commented on affairs and public questions of the day and especially on her particular interest, equal education for women. In March 1795 her play The Medium, or A Happy Tea Party was produced at the Federal Street Theatre in Boston, probably the first at that theater by an American author. That play and her next, The Traveller Returned, produced in March 1796, were unsuccessful. In 1798 Murray╒s ╥Gleaner╙ columns were collected and published in three volumes under that title. In 1802╨1805 she published a few more poems in Boston magazines. She edited her husband╒s Letters and Sketches of Sermons, 1812╨1813, and, after his death in 1815, his Records of the Life of the Rev. John Murray, Written by Himself, with a Continuation by Mrs. Judith Sargent Murray, 1816. In the latter year she left Boston to live with her daughter in Natchez, Mississippi. She died there on July 6, 1820.
