Anna Mowatt Ritchie came from a socially prominent and wealthy New York family. Prior to her career as an actress, no one of her social rank in the United States had read publicly or worked in the theater. Though troubled by exhaustion and illness most of her life, she was a prolific writer and popular actress in both the United States and England. She began her career as a stage actress to save her husband James Mowatt from financial ruin, starring in Shakespearean and Restoration comedies and her own play Fashion; or, Life in New York (1849). Though she wrote articles, essays, and dramatic pieces throughout her life, Fashion and Autobiography of an Actress; or, Eight Years on the Stage (1854) are her most significant works. Throughout her lifetime Mowatt argued and demonstrated that women could have a public life.

When Anna Cora Ogden was born on 12 September 1819, the ninth...