15 Facts About Delia Bacon

Delia Salter Bacon was an American writer of plays and short stories and Shakespeare scholar.

Delia Bacon is best known for her work on the authorship of Shakespeare's plays, which she attributed to social reformers including Francis Bacon, Sir Walter Raleigh and others.

Delia Bacon's admirers included authors Harriet Beecher Stowe, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Ralph Waldo Emerson, the last of whom called her "America's greatest literary producer of the past ten years" at the time of her death.

Delia Bacon was born in a frontier log cabin in Tallmadge, Ohio, the youngest daughter of Congregational minister David Delia Bacon, who in pursuit of a vision, had abandoned New Haven for the wilds of Ohio.

Delia Bacon became a teacher in schools in Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York, and then, until about 1852, became a distinguished professional lecturer, conducting, in various cities in the eastern United States, classes for women in history and literature by methods she devised.

In 1836, Delia Bacon moved to New York, and became an avid theatre-goer.

Delia Bacon met the leading Shakespearean actress Ellen Tree soon after, and persuaded her to take the lead role in a play she was writing, partly in blank verse, entitled The Bride of Fort Edward, based on her award-winning story, Love's Martyr, about Jane M'Crea.

Public opinion compelled Delia Bacon to leave New Haven for Ohio, while Catharine Beecher wrote a book defending her conduct.

Delia Bacon died in 1859, having in 1858 been placed by her family in the care of a lunatic asylum at Hartford, Connecticut.

Delia Bacon withdrew from public life and lecturing in early 1845, and began to research intensively a theory she was developing over the authorship of Shakespeare's works, which she mapped out by October of that year.

Delia Bacon's theory proposed that the missing fourth part of Francis Bacon's unfinished magnum opus, the Instauratio Magna had in fact survived in the form of the plays attributed to Shakespeare.

Delia Bacon argued that the great plays were the collective effort of a:.

Delia Bacon had, in James S Shapiro's reading, a "revolutionary agenda" that consisted in upturning the myths of America's founding fathers and the Puritan heritage.

One recent assessment echoes the favorable view of Delia Bacon held by Emerson, Hawthorne, and Whitman:.

Delia Bacon is interred in Grove Street Cemetery in New Haven, Connecticut.