Anna Cora (Ogden) Mowatt Ritchie (5 March 1819-21 July 1870), novelist, dramatist, and actress, is remembered today for her comedy Fashion. The daughter of Samuel Gouverneur Ogden and Eliza Lewis, she was born in Bordeaux, France, where her father, a New York merchant, was acting as agent for foreign exporters. After the family's return to New York City in 1826, Anna Cora Ogden was educated both at home and in private schools. One of fourteen children, she wrote, directed, and acted in amateur theatricals with her brothers and sisters. At fifteen she eloped with a prosperous twenty-eight-year-old New York lawyer, James Mowatt, and spent her early married life on an estate in Melrose, Long Island. The couple had no children. While still in her teens she wrote an historical romance in verse, Pelayo; or, The Cavern of Covadonga, which was published in 1836 under the pseudonym "Isabel." Unfavorable notices prompted her versified...