Maria Susana Cummins, Mabel Vaughan

Kathy Rees (Independent Scholar - Europe)

Ed. by Stephen E. Meats, Pittsburg State University
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.2: American (US) Writing and Culture: The Nineteenth Century, 1783-1900.
Vol. editors: Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1857

Places

United States (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel
Sentimental

Resources

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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1745 words

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 24 November 2024.]

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