Her admirers included authors Harriet Beecher Stowe, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Ralph Waldo Emerson, the last of whom called her "America's greatest literary producer of the past ten years" at the time of her death.

[4] She became a teacher in schools in Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York, and then, until about 1852, became a distinguished professional lecturer, conducting, in various cities in the eastern United States, classes for women in history and literature by methods she devised.

According to her nephew, Theodore Bacon, she had been seized by a "violent mania" while in England, and had been "removed to an excellent private asylum for a small number of insane persons" at Henley-in-Arden, Warwickshire, before being brought back to America.

[7][8][9] Delia Bacon withdrew from public life and lecturing in early 1845, and began to research intensively a theory she was developing over the authorship of Shakespeare's works, which she mapped out by October of that year.

During these years she was befriended by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and, after securing sponsorship to travel for research to England, in May 1853, met Thomas Carlyle, who though intrigued, shrieked loudly as he heard her exposition.

From her friendship with Samuel Morse, an authority on codes, and encryption for the telegraph, she learned of Bacon's interest in secret ciphers, and this prompted her own approach to the authorship question.

[14] Her theory proposed that the missing fourth part of Francis Bacon's unfinished magnum opus, the Instauratio Magna had in fact survived in the form of the plays attributed to Shakespeare.

[15] Delia Bacon argued that the great plays were the collective effort of a: little clique of disappointed and defeated politicians who undertook to head and organize popular opposition against the government, and were compelled to retreat from that enterprise.. .Driven from one field, they showed themselves in another.

[18] However, Emerson assisted her in publishing her first essay on the Shakespearean question in the January 1856 issue of Putnam's Magazine: How can we undertake to account for the literary miracles of antiquity, while this great myth of the modern ages still lies at our own door, unquestioned?

"[23] James Shapiro interprets her theory both in terms of the cultural tensions of her historical milieu, and as consequential on an intellectual and emotional crisis that unfolded as she both broke with her Puritan upbringing and developed a deep confidential relationship with a fellow lodger, Alexander MacWhorter, a young theology graduate from Yale, which was subsequently interrupted by her brother.

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.