Putnam, Mary T.S. (1810–1898)
Putnam, Mary T.S. (1810–1898)
American author. Name variations: Mary Lowell. Born Mary Traill Spence Lowell on December 3, 1810; died in Boston on June 1, 1898; one of five children of Charles Lowell (minister of the West Church in Boston) and Harriet Brackett (Spence) Lowell (d. 1850); married Samuel R. Putnam (a merchant), on April 25, 1832; sister of James Russell Lowell (a poet, 1819–1891) and Robert Traill Spence Lowell (a writer and Episcopal priest, 1816–1891); sister-in-law of Maria White Lowell (1821–1853).
Mary T.S. Putnam, sister of the poet James Russell Lowell, was born in 1810. She was a "woman of intellectual power and literary accomplishment," writes J.R. Lowell's biographer Horace Scudder. After having lived abroad collecting material, especially in Poland and Hungary, Putnam published anonymously a History of the Constitution of Hungary in Its Relations to Austria (1850). From 1851 to 1857, she resided in France and Germany, perfecting her linguistic abilities. Returning to the United States, she played a prominent role in the abolitionist movement, which she supported vigorously with her writings. Besides numerous contributions to magazines on literature and history, she wrote two dramas on slavery and translated Fredrika Bremer 's The Neighbors from the Swedish.