Editing Delia Bacon (section)

==Legacy==

One recent assessment echoes the favorable view of Bacon held by Emerson, Hawthorne, and Whitman: 
<blockquote>
For too long critics have depicted [her] as a tragicomic  figure, blindly pursuing a fantastic mission in obscurity and isolation, only to end in silence and madness….this is not to say that the stereotype is without basis. On the contrary, her sad story established an archetype for the story of the Shakespeare authorship at large – or at least one element of it: an otherworldly pursuit of truth that produces gifts for a world that is indifferent or hostile to them.<ref>Warren Hope and Kim Holston, ''The Shakespeare Controversy: An Analysis of the Claimants to Authorship, and Their Champions and Detractors''.  Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co, 1992, 1.</ref> </blockquote>

James S. Shapiro argues that her political reading of the plays, and her insistence on [[collaborative authorship]], anticipated modern approaches by a century and a half.
<blockquote>Had she limited her argument to these points instead of conjoining it to an argument about how Shakespeare couldn't have written them, there is little doubt that, instead of being dismissed as a crank and a madwoman, she would be hailed today as the precursor of the [[New Historicism|New Historicists]], and the first to argue that the plays anticipated the political upheavals England experienced in the mid-seventeenth century. But Delia Bacon couldn't stop at that point. Nor could she concede that the republican ideas she located in the plays circulated widely at the time and were as available to William Shakespeare as they were to Walter Raleigh or Francis Bacon.<ref>Shapiro, 2010,109</ref></blockquote>

Her nephew, Theodore Bacon, wrote a biography of her entitled ''Delia Bacon: A Sketch'' (Boston, 1888), and Nathaniel Hawthorne included an appreciative chapter, "Recollections of a Gifted Woman", in his book ''Our Old Home'' (Boston, 1863).  

She died in [[Hartford, Connecticut|Hartford]], Connecticut. She is interred in [[Grove Street Cemetery]] in [[New Haven, Connecticut]].

Bacon and her theories are featured heavily in [[Jennifer Lee Carrell]]'s novel ''[[Interred with Their Bones]]''.