City Readers Digital Historic Collections at the New York Society Library

Susanna Rowson, née Haswell (1762 – 2 March 1824) was a British-American novelist, poet, playwright, religious writer, stage actress, and educator, considered the first woman geographer and supporter of female education and wrote against slavery. Rowson was the author of the 1791 novel Charlotte Temple, the most popular best-seller in American literature until Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin was published serially in 1851-1852 and authored the first human geography textbook Rowson's Abridgement of Universal Geography in 1805.