Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth (26 December 1819 – 30 June 1899), known as E.D.E.N. Southworth, was one of the most popular and prolific American novelists of the nineteenth century. Born in Washington, D.C., to Charles LeCompte Nevitte and Susannah Wailes, she was educated in Washington schools and became a schoolteacher before marrying Frederick H. Southworth in 1840 and moving with him to Utica, New York. The marriage failed within a few years — he abandoned her and their two children — and she returned to Washington, supporting herself and her family by teaching and, increasingly, by writing fiction. She began publishing stories and serials in the 1840s, and her career took off after Retribution appeared in the National Era in 1849. She became a mainstay of the New York Ledger, writing for its editor Robert Bonner for decades and commanding some of the highest fees paid to any American author of her time. Over her career she produced more than sixty novels, many issued first as newspaper serials and then in book form, making her one of the best-selling authors of her era, read alongside contemporaries such as Mary Jane Holmes and Ann S. Stephens in the domestic and sensational fiction tradition. Her novels are melodramatic, sensational romances featuring strong-willed and often persecuted heroines, mysterious identities, secret marriages, villainy, and eventual triumph or vindication. Her best-known titles include The Hidden Hand, with its spirited heroine Capitola Black, along with The Curse of Clifton, Ishmael, and Self-Raised. Critically dismissed in her own time and after as a purveyor of formulaic potboilers, she was immensely popular with readers and financially successful — rare for a woman writer of the period — and is now studied as a significant figure in nineteenth-century American popular and women's fiction. She died in Washington, D.C., in 1899.
2 works on Textopian