Maria Thompson Daviess was an American painter and author. Though firstly being in love with art, she published more than thirteen books, romances for the most part.
Background
Maria Thompson Daviess was born on November 25, 1872 in Harrodsburg, Kentucky, United States. She was the daughter of John Burton Thompson and Leonora (Hamilton) Daviess.
Her father belonged to a family long prominent in Kentucky, and his mother, whose full name he gave to his daughter, was a woman of considerable literary interests and performance. He died early and his widow with her children took up residence at her family home, Nashville, Tennessee, United States. There, except for long visits to her father’s relatives in Kentucky, Maria spent all of her childhood.
Education
After attending the Nashville Young Ladies College and the Hill School in Shelbyville, Kentucky, Maria entered Wellesley, where she remained (1891 - 92) until her mother’s ill health necessitated her being at home.
She studied in the (Nashville) Peabody Art School, and, after her mother’s death, spent two years (1902 - 04) in various schools of art in Paris.
Career
In 1904-05 specimens of her painting were exhibited in the Paris Salon.
Returning to Nashville in the summer of 1904, she taught art, and during the next few years maintained a studio of photography, miniature painting, jewelry design—and general discussion for the local illuminati.
Almost by accident she discovered that she could write stories acceptable to the juvenile readers of Sunday-school magazines, and in 1909 her Miss Selina Lite and the Soapbox Babies made it evident that she could please also many persons of more advanced years.
By 1920 she had published thirteen other books, romances for the most part, all thin and sentimental, but all popular, inspired by a quick, ebullient, amiably disposed mind.
Her best- known work is The Melting of Molly (1912). Some of her other books had distinct and aggressive aims: The Tinderbox (1913), to advance the cause of woman suffrage; Over Paradise Ridge (1915), to check the flow of population from farm to city; The Heart’s Kingdom (1917), to solve religious difficulties; and The Matrix (1920), to emphasize the extent of the nation’s indebtedness to Lincoln’s mother. Most of these purposes were restated along with many convictions of hers in her autobiography, Seven Times Seven, presented in seven “reels, ” as she named her chapters, during 1924.
As soon as the income from her books warranted her doing so she bought a farm near Nashville and lived on it when she was not more attracted to New York.
During the World War in 1917-18 she was commissioned by the government to go about making speeches to show the importance of food corn servation.
For the last five years of her life she suffered pitiably from articular rheumatism.