Background

Mary Jane Holmes was born Mary Jane Hawes on April 5, 1825, in Brookfield, Massachusetts, United States to Preston and Fanny (Olds) Hawes. Her parents apparently held strict moral codes. Holmes's uncle Hawes, a local preacher, wrote moral pamphlets for young ladies, prescribing appropriate emotions for members of the fair sex. Holmes herself seems to have both absorbed and chafed against these moral guidelines.

Education

Mary was trained as a teacher.

Career

By the age of fifteen, Holmes had begun to edge toward the forbidden longing of being writer, publishing stories that would make her famous. Holmes continued teaching for some time, however; in her twenties, she married and together with her husband Daniel Holmes taught for a while before moving to Brockport, New York. There, Daniel worked as a lawyer while Holmes cranked out a novel a year. The first of these novels, Tempest and Sunshine (1854), was an instant hit with the public. The story is typical of Holmes, though not acclaimed by critics as her best work.

Holmes's next novel espouses the same model of triumphant female meekness, but this time in the form of a Bildungsroman.

Holmes offered her readers what comforted them in issues of sexual politics - and in issues of racial politics. From time to time, her moral landscape included some glimmer of the horrors endured by a slave population, only to retreat into cant about the comforts of the "peculiar institution."

Critics have attempted both to bury and to praise Holmes's fiction on moral grounds - they argue her work is racist, or sexist, and then argue that she is subtly critical of both racism and sexism. Perhaps her novels were so enormously popular, however, because they are both feminist and anti-feminist because they are racist while they recognize the moral wrong of racism. Holmes's fiction pleased her audience for so long, perhaps, because it was new and familiar because it was morally contradictory because it spoke to her audience's own contradictory desires. Whether or not her novels are "good," aesthetically or morally, they are valuable as indices to the hearts of Holmes's contemporaries - contradictory and confused though those hearts might be.

Holmes died on October 6, 1907, still unacknowledged by critics, still beloved by her readers.

Achievements

• Mary Jane Holmes is best known for her popular domestic fiction, which sold tremendously well throughout her career.

Works

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  • The English Orphans; Or, A Home in the New World

    (Mary Jane Holmes was a 19th century American author known...)

  • Darkness Daylight

    (Excerpt from Darkness Daylight: A Novel GO to Collingwood...)

  • Cousin Maude

    (Excerpt from Cousin Maude She was pledged to leave the vi...)

  • Lena Rivers

    (It is the story of Lena Rivers, and orphan growing up in ...)

    1856
  • Homestead on the Hillside

    (Buy Homestead on the Hillside by Mary Jane Holmes from Am...)

  • Chateau d'Or

    (He promised her everything money could buy. For beautiful...)

  • Heliotrope with Matches and Magnifying Glass
  • The English Orphans
  • Daisy Thornton
  • Dora Deane
  • Rosamond or, The Youthful Error
  • Jessie Graham
  • Aikenside
  • Bad Hugh
  • Family Pride
  • Tempest and Sunshine

Religion

Holmes was active in the Episcopal Church and its charitable activities.

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• As Dorri Beam writes, in an article for the Dictionary of Literary Biography: "Mary Jane Holmes is estimated to have rivaled Harriet Beecher Stowe in earnings and stand next to E. P. Roe as probably the most widely read of American novelists writing after the Civil War. Her thirty-nine books reached sales of more than two million copies."

Connections

On August 9, 1849, Mary married Daniel Holmes, a graduate of Yale College from New York City. They had no children.

Father:

Preston Hawes

Mother:

Fanny (Olds) Hawes

Spouse:

Daniel Holmes

References

• Contemporary Authors: Vol 182
• The Portrayal of Woman's Sentimental Power in American Domestic Fiction: The Novels of Mary Jane Holmes, 1825-1907 This book explores the rediscovery of the fiction written by Mary Jane Holmes (1825-1907) and examines the contrasting factors that made her work popular in the nineteenth century, but virtually unknown during the twentieth century. Cultural poetics and feminism, which established a critique on how late nineteenth- and twentieth-century critics decontextualized Holmes' work is the critical emphasis of this study. The theory of this study examines aspects of relational capacity that popular women writers present and that which their works are based on, and which enables them to relate to their culture and readers.