Maria Susana Cummins, Mabel Vaughan

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Mabel Vaughan was the second of Cummins’s four novels, all published anonymously although her identity soon became known. Her books were immensely popular, especially among middle-class female readers. Nina Baym characterises Cummins’s first novel, The Lamplighter (1854) as “the orphan’s rise”, and Mabel Vaughan as “the heiress’s fortunate fall”: both are “stories of spiritual as well as social regeneration” (170). Cummins was a devout Unitarian, and her books advocate a form of Protestantism that is grounded in the concept of the individual being fundamentally capable but needing to be strengthened by a spiritual understanding of experience. Like …

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Citation: Rees, Kathy. "Mabel Vaughan". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 11 November 2016 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=35842, accessed 29 March 2024.]

35842 Mabel Vaughan 3 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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