The Postmillennial Prophetess and Her Historian Heroines: Revisiting the Early Fiction of Delia Bacon

This essay revisits the early fiction of Delia Bacon (1811-1859), one of the first individuals to develop a Shakespeare authorship conspiracy theory. Her historical novellas, published as the collection Tales of the Puritans in 1831, show Bacon both working in and developing her own interpretation of postmillennial history that would be further explored in her authorship theory. In the postmillennial framework, human history can be interpreted and understood as a religious text in which God struggles with Satan to bring about the millennium of Christ’s reign. Bacon understood this struggle as Satan conspiring against humanity through corrupt, impious institutions, and portrays Puritan women as a persecuted minority tasked with resisting and counter-conspiring against these institutions. Bacon’s young heroines express their understanding of the events around them in these postmillennialist terms. In doing so, Bacon creates a unique type of character in women’s nineteenth-century fiction: the postmillennialist historian heroine. These characters understand history and their role in it so that they become seers, willingly risking personal safety and comfort to resist the machinations of institutions thwarting postmillennialist progress.