Life and Career

E.D.E.N. Southworth moved out to Wisconsin after graduating from Washington, D.C. She was a schoolteacher for a time until her marriage to Frederick Hamilton Southworth, an inventor

She began to write stories to support herself and her children when he husband deserted her in 1844. Her earliest works appeared in The National Era, the newspaper that printed Uncle Tom's Cabin. The bulk of her work appeared as a serial in Robert Bonner's The New York Ledger, which was widely read in the 1850s and 1860s. Like her friend Harriet Beecher Stowe, she was a supporter of social change and rights for women, but she was not nearly as active on these issues.

Her best known work was The Hidden Hand, originally published as The Ledger in 1859. Most of her novels deal with the South during the antebellum era.

Bibliography

note - most of Southworth's novels were serialised before their publications, sometimes under different titles.