Anna Cora Mowatt

Actress and playwright, born in Bordeaux, France. The daughter of a well-to-do American merchant, she went to the USA at age seven. She started out as a playwright, and her social satire, Fashion, was a success in 1845. Despite earlier ill health, she then became an actress, debuting as Pauline in The Lady of Lyons, and later formed her own company, which travelled to London.

Anna Cora Ogden Mowatt (March 5, 1819 - July 21, 1870), author and actress, was born in Bordeaux, France, where her father, the American agent for several French exporting firms, was then living. Uzal Ogden, a distinguished Episcopal (later Presbyterian) clergyman of New Jersey, and her maternal great-grandfather, Francis Lewis, a New York merchant, was a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Except for four years of boarding school after the Ogdens returned to New York City in 1826, Anna Cora (or Lily, as she was known in the family) was educated chiefly at home. This bent was encouraged by her father and later by her husband, James Mowatt, a well-to-do New York attorney thirteen years her senior with whom she eloped at the age of fifteen, on October 6, 1834.

Early writing

Mrs. Mowatt's early married life was spent at Melrose, a handsome estate in Flatbush, Long Island, where she and her husband entertained New York society and many literary figures of the day. In 1837 Mrs. Mowatt developed symptoms of tuberculosis and went abroad for her health, spending several months in Germany diligently learning the language and reading German literature. The Mowatts went to Paris to consult the celebrated Dr. Samuel Hahnemann, founder of homeopathy, and there Mrs. Mowatt met such notables as Mrs. Frances Trollope, Lady Bulwer, and Madame de Lasteyrie, the daughter of Lafayette; In 1840, with James Mowatt's eyesight restored, the couple returned to the United States and resumed life at Melrose. At a grand ball given to celebrate their homecoming Mrs. Mowatt presented an original verse drama, Gulzara, or The Persian Slave (published, 1841, in the New World), in which she played the leading part.

James Mowatt's health, however, now declined into invalidism, and in the fall of 1841 he lost his fortune through speculation. Forced to assume their support, Mrs. Mowatt, lacking experience in practical affairs, turned to the one talent of which she felt confident and embarked on a series of public poetry readings. This novel venture met with great success in Boston, Providence, New York, and other cities and inspired numerous imitators, at least one of whom advertised offerings "in the style and manner of Mrs. Mowatt." During the next two years (1842-44) she produced, under various pseudonyms, a formidable miscellany of poems, articles, and biographies, as well as manuals on cooking, etiquette, the care of the sick, household management, and needlework, some of these ghostwritten for the well-known English author "Mrs. Ellis" (Sarah Stickney Ellis). She also wrote two novels, The Fortune Hunter (1844), a realistic story of New York life, and Evelyn (1845), the latter of which appeared under her own name. Besides writing and the care of her husband, Mrs. Mowatt now had charge of three children whom she had rescued from the slums--Margaret, John, and Willie Grey--to whom she remained deeply attached. from the early days of their marriage she and James Mowatt had been dedicated Swedenborgians.

Playwriting

It was at the suggestion of Epes Sargent, a New York journalist who was her literary mentor and close friend, that Mrs. Mowatt turned to playwriting. The five-act comedy Fashion, her best-known work, was written in a few weeks in the spring of 1845 and accepted at once for production at the Park Theatre. Fashion is a bright satire on New York high life of the 1840's, and though it is larded with sentimentality, with numerous borrowings from Sheridan and Beaumarchais, the tone of high comedy is sustained throughout. In modern times Fashion has had numerous performances by college and little theater groups and two professional revivals in New York (1924 and 1959), a distinction enjoyed by no other American play written before 1850.

The production of Fashion brought Mrs. Mowatt for the first time in touch with the working theater. Her successful debut at the Park Theater, June 13, 1845, as Pauline in The Lady of Lyons, marked the beginning of one of the most remarkable careers in the history of the American theater. Without the usual rigorous apprenticeship, Mrs. Mowatt started at the top of the profession and for eight years held a place among the foremost actresses of the English-speaking stage. Anna Mowatt had a slight, graceful figure, fine, bold features, deep blue eyes, and masses of auburn hair, but it was the naturalness of her style, her beautifully modulated voice, and the fire and intelligence of her interpretations that won high praise from critics like Edgar Allan Poe and the British writers John Oxenford and George Henry Lewes. Her life on the stage and her earlier history are related in her lively and unassuming Autobiography of an Actress (1854), an important source book for the British and American stage of the mid-nineteenth century.

James Mowatt, who had been constantly at his wife's side throughout the years, died in London in 1851. She played for two more seasons, traveling as far as New Orleans, and made her last stage appearance on June 3, 1854.

Her second marriage proved unhappy, and at the outbreak of the Civil War] she left her husband and returned to the North. Barnes, The Lady of Fashion (1954), gives full details of Mrs. Mowatt's life and work against the social background of the period and includes an extensive bibliography. Marius Blesi, "The Life and Letters of Anna Cora Mowatt" (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Univ. See also Imogene McCarthy, "Anna Cora Mowatt and Her Am. of Md., 1952), especially useful on her Richmond life, which is also touched upon in Marion Harland, "Personal Recollections of a Christian Actress," Our Continent, Mar. 15, 1882, and in Marion Harland's Autobiography (1910).