Frances Wright

Frances Wright (Fanny Wright), 1795-1852, Scottish-American reformer, later known as Mme Darusmont, b. Dundee, Scotland. After her first tour (1818-20) of the United States she wrote an enthusiastic account of her travels, Views of Society and Manners in America (1821). In 1824 she returned to the United States. Influenced by Robert Dale Owen, she founded Nashoba, a colony for free blacks, near Memphis, Tenn. After its failure she devoted herself to lecturing and publishing. She advocated equal rights for women, universal education, religious freedom, abolition, and birth control. In 1831 she married William P. Darusmont (or D'Arusmont); the marriage was dissolved in 1835.

Bibliography: See biographies by W. R. Waterman (1924) and A. J. G. Perkins and T. Wolfson (1939).

Wright, Frances (1795–1852), Scottish‐born free‐thinker and author, who spent two years in the U.S. (1818–20), where she produced her play Altorf (1819), about the Swiss fight for independence, and toured the country as reported in her enthusiastic Views of Society and Manners in America (1821). While abroad she wrote A Few Days in Athens (1822), fiction about a young disciple of Epicurus, which Whitman later called his “daily food.” Returning to the U.S. (1824), she accompanied Lafayette on his triumphal tour and through him met Jefferson and Madison. Encouraged by them, she founded the Nashoba Community (1825–28) in Tennessee as part of her plan for gradual emancipation of blacks. Influenced by Robert Dale Owen, she joined him in editing The New‐Harmony Gazette (1828–29), meanwhile giving public talks on women's rights, free education, birth control, equitable distribution of wealth, and errors of organized religion. These and later talks, given after an absence abroad (1830–35), were published as Course of Popular Lectures (2 vols., 1829, 1836).