Bacon, Delia Salter

Bacon, Delia Salter( 1811–59),
was among the first to propound the theory that Shakespeare's plays were written by a group headed by Bacon and including Raleigh and Spenser, and that a great system of thought was concealed in them by ciphers. Emerson and Carlyle encouraged her for a time, and Hawthorne, who describes her in Our Old Home, wrote a preface for her Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded (1857). She also wrote such fiction as Tales of the Puritans (1831) and The Bride of Fort Edward (1839), a closet drama on the Revolution. She was violently insane during her last two years.