	Delia Bacon was an American woman, born in Ohio in 1811. Orphaned as a child, she and her siblings were raised by various relatives, often separately. As a young girl, her path in life was greatly altered by one of these relatives, a well-educated woman who believed deeply in the education of other women. Accordingly, Bacon began to receive rigorous tutoring, and her natural aptitude for writing and academic thought soon emerged. By the age of fifteen, Bacon was working as a teacher for younger girls and beginning to support herself. Her career in teaching would last most of her life, and eventually include opening a school for women with her sister, working with small groups of women in Boston, and a long stint on the Boston academic lecture circuit.
	At twenty years old, Bacon’s other career was launched: writing. She published a book of stories titled Tales of the Puritans, which mainly followed young women’s lives against a backdrop of American identity and history. Though the book was not particularly successful, it did garner some critical appreciation from her literary peers. A few years later, she published The Bride of Fort Edward, a play set in the Revolutionary era. Concurrently, she continued to lecture and teach, supporting herself and her budding literary aspirations.
	In 1847, a relationship scandal drove Bacon to flee New Haven and settle in Boston instead. There she found a greater audience for both her classes, taught to women in the middle and upper classes, and her lectures, given to women and some men on topics of history and literature. Shakespeare was one of her favorite topics to teach and lecture on, and some of her students noted that her passion for it was obvious and inspiring. By the time she had moved to Boston, it’s likely that Bacon had already begun to question the authorship of the Shakespeare canon, and create her own theories about its origin.
“Inquiry” was published as the first in a six-part series of articles, as an introduction to the idea of an authorship question, and like modern authorship works it choses to review and place doubt on the life and biography of Shakspere (as Bacon refers to him). In contrast, Philosophy is a 300 page work that focuses little if at all on the man from Stratford, instead analyzing the political content of the plays and comparing it with the writings and philosophies of Sir Francis Bacon. The two works have different goals as well as different focuses, and must be dealt with individually.
When turning to what evidence we do have, her arguments against authorship by the man from Stratford are twofold: his education, and his unceremonious treatment of the plays. Additionally, she repeatedly addresses the legend built up around the author, and the lack of rigorous inquiry around his life.
Within the information given, however, she is still unconvinced, particularly around his education. As a writer considered by herself and others to be a genius, Bacon soundly rejected the idea that genius alone could have written Shakespeare’s plays. 
