Wright, Frances (1795-1852)

British abolitionist and social activist. She purchased 640 acres near Memphis, Tennessee, and set up a plantation, Nashoba, on which she intended to demonstrate a method for liberating slaves. Her scheme ended in scandal, but through highly controversial lectures, she continued attacking not only slavery but also organized religion and laws forbidding marriage between the races. Although she thus antagonized many Americans, she gained the respect of others such as the young Walt Whitman.

She was born in Dundee, Scotland, and, having lost both parents while a child, she was raised by relatives. She read on her own and by her twenties was writing romantic poetry and plays with progressive themes. She went to the USA in 1818 with a younger sister and had her play Altorf produced in New York, New York; when it failed, she travelled throughout the Northeast and then returned to Britain in 1820. Her Views of Society and Manners in America (1821) became one of the best-known traveller's accounts of the day, distinguished by its almost embarrassing praise for everything in the New World. She went to France in 1821 and began a somewhat ambiguous relationship with the ageing Marquis de Lafayette, almost 40 years her senior. When he made his famous ‘farewell tour’ of the USA in 1824-25, she followed him. She stayed on in the USA and took on the cause of abolishing slavery.

By 1829 she was settling in New York. She had by this time linked up with Robert Dale Owen of the utopian community at New Harmony, Indiana, and she joined him in publishing the Free Enquirer in which she promulgated her increasingly more radical views about religion, education, and other social issues. She went to Paris, France, in 1830, married a French doctor and reformer in 1831, and in 1835 returned to the USA with him and their child, settling this time in Cincinnati, Ohio, but continuing to lecture until 1839. In her last book, England, the Civilizer (1848), she called for a sort of united nations that would impose peace on the world; in its vague theorizing, it was an instance of the idealism and impracticality that characterized so much of her life and work.