Author: Morton, Sarah Wentworth
Biography:
MORTON, Sarah Wentworth formerly APTHORP (1759-1846: WBIS)
pseudonym Philenia
The daughter of Sarah (Wentworth) and James Apthorp, she was born into a wealthy Boston family. By her marriage in 1781 to Perez Morton, a well-connected lawyer and fine speaker who eventually became the state attorney general, she consolidated her social position. They had six children, five of whom survived infancy. In 1788, the family was shaken by scandal when her sister Frances committed suicide after giving birth to an illegitimate child, the consequence of an affair with Perez Morton. A sensational novel on the subject, The Power of Sympathy (1789) by William Hill Brown, was later mistakenly attributed to her. In 1789 Morton embarked on a public poetic career, writing as "Philenia" in local periodicals--poems later reprinted across the country. (Robert Treat Paine [q.v.] included some of her poetic correspondence as Philenia--giving her real name--with his as Menander in his Works of 1812.) Her work was so highly regarded that she was the only woman writer included in the 1793 anthology American Poems, Selected and Original. But the only title that she published under her full name was her last book, My Mind and Its Thoughts. Despite her popularity at the time, there is no collected edition. After the death of her husband in 1837, she moved back to the Apthorp family home in Braintree, where she died. (ANBO 15 Apr. 2020; Appleton)
Other Names:
- Mrs. Perez Morton
- S. M.