Maria Southwell  (ca. 1805– )

Maria Southwell’s place of birth is uncertain. Francis Courtney Wemyss, in Chronology of the American Stage (1852), gives Dublin as her place of birth, but it seems more likely to have been Liverpool or London, since it was after the family flight from Dublin.

She was a singer and actress, first in London and later in Philadelphia and New York. Her name is included in a playbill for the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, London in 1822 as a member of the cast of a Comick Opera ‘Belles Without Beaux’. In 1824 she appeared in a performance of ‘Der Freischutz’ (Weber) at the Theatre Royal, English Opera House. In 1826 she appeared in Tom Cooke’s production of Oberon, or The Charmed Horn: A Romantic Fairy Tale in Two Acts. By 1828 she had joined her brother Henry at the Chestnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia, where she is recorded by Wemyss as having aided her brother by being cast in the title role in the opera Malvina. By 1829 she had moved to New York where she appeared in the role of Lucy in The Young Widow. Subsequently she married a Mr. Golden, retired from the profession, and settled in New York.

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