Author: Wright, Frances
Biography:
WRIGHT, Frances, later D'ARUSMONT (1795-1852: ODNB)
Freethinker and reformer, she was born in Dundee to James Wright, a wealthy linen-merchant of radical liberal sympathies, and his wife Camilla Campbell. Her parents both died in 1798, however, and their three children were sent separately to live with relatives. Frances was reunited with her younger sister Camilla in 1806. From 1813 to 1816 the sisters lived in Glasgow in the family of a great-uncle who taught moral philosophy and who encouraged their intellectual interests. In this period Frances wrote a play, Altorf, and a utopian treatise, A Few Days in Athens, both of which were published later. But the defining event of her life was the voyage she undertook to America in 1818, accompanied by her sister. The enthusiastic book she published on her return, Views of Society and Manners in America (1821), attracted the attention and support of Lafayette, among others. In 1824, following Lafayette, they returned to the US, where Frances embarked on a practical experiment for the managed emancipation of slaves. The experiment failed but she did make good her promise and settled her slaves, with their growing families, as free citizens in Haiti in 1830. In the meantime, her views had become more radical and she had shifted her base of operations to New York, where she co-edited the New Harmony Gazetteand embarked on a controversial career as a public lecturer, dressing in trousers and denouncing the prevailing systems of religion, property, marriage, and education. The sisters returned to England in 1830 and went to live in Paris. Frances gave birth to a daughter, the father being Guillaume ("William") Sylvan Phiquepal d'Arusmont (b 1811), a French physician who had been with her in Haiti. Camilla died in Paris early in 1831. In July of that year, Frances married Phiquepal d'Arusmont; to legitimize their daughter, they later gave her the birth date of a second child born in April 1832 who died in infancy. The couple travelled together to the US in 1835 but eventually divorced. Frances lost custody of their child. She died in Cincinnati in Dec. 1852 and is buried in Spring Grove Cemetery. (ODNB 14 Mar. 2021; ANBO 14 Mar. 2021; Orlando; ancestry.com 14 Mar. 2021)