Delia Salter Bacon--who was a friend of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Nathaniel Hawthorne--believed that William Shakespeare's plays were the work of Francis Bacon and his cadre of literary friends. Bacon had some support in her belief. Emerson helped her publish a sketch on the subject in Putnam's Monthly Magazine, in January 1856. The editor's note called Bacon's interesting speculations "the result of long and conscientious investigation upon the part of the learned and eloquent scholar." In 1857, with Hawthorne's assistance, she published The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded. The speculative quest Bacon launched has continued to give her theory conversational currency.

As the fourth daughter and the fifth of seven children of former missionaries to the American Indians, Delia Salter Bacon had a difficult young life. She was born in a log cabin, reportedly the first house in Tallmadge, Summit County, Ohio, south of Cleveland...