Judith Sargent Murray, essayist and poet, was born in Gloucester, Massachusetts, the first child of Winthrop and Judith Saunders Sargent. The Sargents were prosperous, public-spirited merchants who were interested in the advancement of education and culture. Thus her parents provided Judith with the same instruction given her brother Winthrop, short of Harvard College. Both she and her brother seemed to have shared a lifelong interest in literature, although he did not pursue it as a career. After military service in the Revolution and Indian wars, he became a Southern planter and politician and was the first governor of Mississippi Territory.

On 3 October 1769, at the age of eighteen, Judith Sargent married Captain John Stevens, a merchant seaman, who built for her, probably with the help of her father, the Gloucester mansion known today as the Sargent-Murray-Gilman-Hough house. They had no children. During the Revolution Captain Stevens fell into financial...