Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth

Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth (1819–1899), who published as Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth, was among the most popular American novelists of the nineteenth century. Born in Washington, D.C., she was deserted by her husband with two small children and turned to writing to support them, producing more than sixty novels, most of them serialized in Robert Bonner's New York Ledger, for which she wrote exclusively for decades. The Hidden Hand, with its cross-dressing heroine Capitola, was her greatest success and was dramatized many times. Her books mix Gothic melodrama, sentiment and a persistent interest in women who refuse to be ruled.