Emily Chubbuck Judson papers, M3005

Author, teacher, and missionary Emily Chubbuck Judson was born in Eaton, New York, on August 22, 1817, to Charles Chubbuck and Lavinia Richards. After serving as a teacher at the public schools in and around Morrisville, New York, from 1832 to 1840, Judson was invited to study on scholarship at the Utica Female Seminary, where she remained until 1846 as a teacher of English composition.

Building upon earlier anonymous literary pursuits, Judson began to publish and receive recognition under her own maiden name in 1841, with children's books like Charles Linn; or, How to Observe the Golden Rule (1841) and John Frick; or, The Third Commandment Illustrated (1844). In 1844 she became a regular contributor to the popular New York weekly, the Mirror, under the pseudonym Franny Forester. The sketches she wrote as Forester revolved around rural and small town life, and were soon picked up by other popular publications.

After marrying Baptist missionary and widower Adoniram Judson in Hamilton, New York, on June 2, 1846, Judson traveled with her husband to Burma, where she remained, learning Burmese, assisting her husband with a Burmese dictionary, and completing a spiritual memoir of her husband's first wife, Sarah, until her husband's death in 1850. Back in the United States, she settled in Hamilton with her parents, sister, five stepchildren, and daughter. She died as the result of tuberculosis in Hamilton in 1834, where she is buried.

Jeanne M. Malloy, "Judson, Emily Chubbuck," American National Biography Online accessed March 6, 2014, http://www.anb.org/articles/16/16-00887.html.