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Delia Bacon hated William Shakespeare so passionately she lost her mind and her health trying to prove he didn’t write those plays.  She dismissed him as a vulgar, illiterate deer poacher and ‘Lord Leicester’s stable boy.’ She preferred to believe Francis Bacon authored the plays – and that she was related to Bacon (she wasn’t).
Delia Bacon must have been smart and charismatic, for she was able to enlist Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Carlyle and Nathaniel Hawthorne in her tragicomic campaign to debunk Shakespeare’s authorship. She would cross the Atlantic to conduct her research, at one point hell-bent on opening Shakespeare’s tomb to find the proof she just knew Bacon had hidden. She was viewed as a crank and a madwoman, though today literary critics praise her scholarship and originality.
Delia Bacon was born on Feb. 2, 1811 in a log cabin in Tallmadge, Ohio. Her father, a Congregationalist missionary, was trying to bring Puritanism to the Ohio frontier. He died when Delia was six, and the family returned to New England. The Bacon children were farmed out to friends, and Delia was sent to Catherine Beecher’s school in Hartford.  Beecher called her the ‘homeless daughter of the Western missionary,’ who was ‘preeminently one who would be pointed out as a genius; and one, too, so exuberant and unregulated as to demand great pruning and restraint.’
Her education ended when she was 14. She tried to start her own school, suffered from malaria and migraine headaches and won $100 for a short story from the Philadelphia Saturday Courier, beating out Edgar Allan Poe. She read widely and became a respected professional lecturer, traveling around the East Coast teaching history and literature for women.
At 36 she was living in a boardinghouse in New Haven, where she had a disastrous love affair with Alexander MacWhorter,  a 23-year-old theology graduate at Yale. Delia’s brother Leonard, also a minister, got involved. He announced Delia was engaged to MacWhorter, who quickly backed off. Leonard then demanded MacWhorter stand trial before a panel of 23 ministers. MacWhorter claimed Delia pursued him; Delia claimed he led her on; witnesses said MacWhorter had first chased Delia. The verdict: 12 for MacWhorter, 11 for Delia. It was a national scandal, and she was mortified.
It was around then that she threw herself into her campaign to discredit Shakespeare who, she said, was ‘a standing disgrace to genius and learning.’ She tried to persuade Ralph Waldo Emerson, who she met through Elizabeth Peabody. Emerson introduced her to a wealthy friend who paid for her to spend a year in England researching her theory. He also encouraged Putnam’s Monthly to give her assignments and gave her a letter of introduction to his friend, the English historian Thomas Carlyle. Carlyle shrieked loudly when Delia told him her theory.

Francis Bacon, not a relative

She didn’t do any hard research in libraries or museums, convinced the proof to her theory was in the plays themselves. She believed the plays were secretly written by Bacon, Walter Raleigh and Edmund Spenser. She became obsessed with the idea of opening Bacon’s tomb for proof.
For two years she worked alone in an unheated room on her book about Shakespeare. Her first article for Putnam’s Monthly appeared toward the end of her third year in London. The readers’ negative reaction and her lack of research prompted Putnam’s to drop her.
She had needed the money. Desperate, she reached out to the U.S. consul in Liverpool, Nathaniel Hawthorne – Emerson’s friend and Peabody’s brother-in-law. Hawthorne paid her debts, read her work and helped her get published. He even wrote the forward for the book, called The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded.
She was furious that Hawthorne wrote in the forward that he didn’t believe her.
While waiting for the book to be published, she tried to get into Shakespeare’s tomb to find the proof she knew Bacon had hidden there. Night after night she came into the church with a lantern and stare at the altar. The vicar almost considered letting her into the tomb. She fell ill and gave up. Her brother Leonard was convinced she was lapsing into insanity and begged her to come home.
When the 682-page book was finally published, no one read it but critics who trashed it. Delia became suicidal, delusional and feverish. She was committed to an asylum in England, then sent home, where she died in an asylum in Hartford on Sept. 2, 1859, at age 48.
In his book Contested Will, Who Wrote Shakespeare, James Shapiro has praised Delia Bacon for anticipating modern criticism and for being the first to recognize Shakespeare foretold England’s political upheavals. Had she just stopped there, he wrote, she would not have been dismissed as a crank and a madwoman.

via The New England Historical Society