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Mary Bayard Devereux Clarke was an American author. She was an editor of Southern Field and Fireside and Literary Pastime.
Background
Mary Bayard Devereux Clarke was born on May 13, 1827, in Raleigh, North Carolina, United States. Her parents were Thomas Pollock Devereux, of North Carolina, and Katherine Anne Johnson of Connecticut. Her father was a lawyer and planter of considerable wealth. She was descended from many distinguished ancestors, among whom, in addition to five colonial governors, were Jonathan Edwards and Dr. Samuel Johnson, first president of what is now Columbia University. Her mother died when she was a child.
Education
Thomas Pollock Devereux employed an English governess to superintend Mary's education. It is said that this personage at length subjected her charge to the full course of instruction prescribed at Yale. She learned to read with discrimination and to write gracefully.
She had some command of modern languages, and she conversed with so much erudition, yet so much gaiety, that she impressed acquaintances as one of the few women in America who, “without being a blue-stocking, was thoroughly educated.
Career
In 1854, Mary Clarke published Wood Notes, a collection of North Carolina poetry, some of which, under her pseudonym, Tenella, she had written herself. Her contributions are romantic and imitative, but at times, in their reference to North Carolina, they give evidence of a wholesome clarity of outlook. An indisposition which was declared tubercular in origin caused her to spend the winter of 1854 in Havana—a residence described in her “Reminiscences of Cuba, ” published in the Southern Literary Messenger, September-December, 1855. Here she danced much, rode horse-back, and attended countless plays and parties, but she was none the less glad, when the climate of San Antonio was judged better for her, to forsake a “land of despotism for the home of liberty and equal laws. ” That liberty, under the frontier and half-military surroundings in which she and her family found themselves, proved in the event sometimes more inclusive than she had anticipated.
At the outbreak of the Civil War, her husband went into the Confederate army, and she with her four children returned to North Carolina. Here she wrote quantities of patriotic verse, which appeared from time to time in the newspapers. Much of this, along with other work, was published in 1866 as Mosses from a Rolling Stone or Idle Moments of a Busy Woman. The war having destroyed her family’s one-time affluence, she recognized that she was under the necessity of earning money, and followed this necessity arduously but bravely for the remainder of her life. In 1865 she became for a while an editor of the Southern Field and Fireside.
She published a long narrative poem, Clyde and Zenobia (1871), translated a French novel, composed an operatic libretto titled Miskodeed and wrote “Sunday-school hymns at five dollars a piece. ” Poverty and illness caused her great despondency, from which, though always a faithful Protestant, she sought relief at times from Rome and at other times from the Ethical Culture Society. She became paralyzed, and had a fatal stroke in 1886.
In 1848, Mary Bayard Devereux married William J. Clarke. The Clarkes had two sons and a daughter. The eldest son, Francis Devereux, became a nationally recognized educator of the deaf.