Daughter of Ann Eliza Bleecker, Margaretta Bleecker grew up in the shadow of her mother’s depression and early death. Her father gave her a superior education, but she rejected his aristocratic pretensions, marrying a French physician, Peter Faugères, on Bastille Day, 1791. Faugères published occasional verse in magazines under the pen name Ella, and many of her poems uncannily prefigure the tone and themes of early Freneau and Edgar Allan Poe. She also collected her mother’s extant poetry and prose and published them, along with her own poetry and essays on democratic themes, in 1793. Abusive and profligate, her husband squandered most of Faugères’s inheritance and left her and their daughter destitute when he died in 1798. To support herself, Faugères taught school but quickly declined and died early, like her mother, at age thirty.

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