Biographical Note
Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth, born Emma Nevitte on December 26, 1819, in Washington, D.C., was a late nineteenth-century author whose domestic novels reached a wide audience in the United States and Europe. A school teacher before marriage, Southworth turned to writing to support her family after separating from husband, Frederick Southworth, an itinerant inventor, in 1844. Her first novel, Retribution, published in 1849, sold widely, and she is credited with helping introduce the character types of the self-made man and the independent woman to American fiction.
Southworth wrote more than sixty novels, many of them first presented serially in such magazines as the Saturday Evening Post and the New York Ledger. The Hidden Hand, written in 1859, became a successful book in 1888. A common setting in her writings was the South in the post-Civil War era. Friends with Harriet Beecher Stowe, Southworth was also a supporter of women's rights. She lived in Georgetown, Washington, D.C., until the 1870s, then in Yonkers, New York, and again in Georgetown, where she died on June 30, 1899.