page_title: Susanna Rowson
section_title: Childhood
hierarchical_section_title: Susanna Rowson / Biography / Childhood
caption_attribution_description: From: Susanna Rowson. Miscellaneous poems. (Boston: Gilbert &amp; Dean, 1804)
context_page_description: Susanna Rowson, née Haswell 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.
context_section_description: Susanna Haswell was born in 1762 in Portsmouth, England to Royal Navy Lieutenant William Haswell and his first wife, Susanna Musgrave, who died within days of Susanna's birth. While stationed in Boston her father remarried to Rachel Woodward and started a second family, and after his ship returned to Portsmouth and was decommissioned, he obtained an appointment as a Boston customs officer, bringing his daughter and a servant with him to Massachusetts. On arrival in January 1767, their ship grounded on Lovells Island in Boston Harbor, the crew and passengers being rescued from the wreck days later. They lived at Nantasket (now Hull), where family friend James Otis took a special interest in Susanna's education. At the outbreak of the American Revolution, Lieutenant Haswell was placed under house arrest, and subsequently the family was moved inland, to Hingham and Abington, Massachusetts. In 1778, his failing health led to a prisoner exchange, and the family was sent via Halifax, Nova Scotia to England, eventually settling near Kingston upon Hull. Their American property was confiscated and they lived in relative poverty, being forced to sell the Portsmouth property left Susanna by her grandfather in order to support the family., a
caption: Rowson's poems, published in 1804 by Gilbert & Dean, Boston
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