Margaret Deland was an American short-story writer, novelist and poet who frequently portrayed small-town life, and also wrote an autobiography in two volumes.
Background
Margaret Deland was born on February 23, 1857 near Allegheny, Pennsylvania. She was the only child of Sample Campbell, a Pittsburgh clothing merchant, and his second wife, Margaretta Wade, daughter of an ordnance manufacturer whose English ancestors had been early settlers in Maryland. She was christened Margaretta Wade but later shortened the name to Margaret.
Her father, who had two grown children by an earlier marriage, was a native of Kentucky. Her mother died at Margaret's birth, and she was placed in the household of her maternal aunt and uncle, Lois (Wade) and Benjamin Bakewell Campbell. (Her uncle, though of the same name, was not related to her father, who died when she was about four. )
Reared as a daughter amid a colony of aunts, uncles, and cousins, she grew up on a plantation-like estate in Manchester, on the banks of the Ohio River near Allegheny. It was apparently an agreeable childhood despite religious training in a gloomy Calvinism "only faintly brightened by a stratum of Episcopalianism from my Wade grandparents. " A spirited girl, Maggie Campbell did not easily accept the rules of propriety laid down for young women of her day.
Education
At the age of sixteen, following a youthful love affair, Deland was sent to Pelham Priory, a boarding school near New Rochelle, New York, for "young females of good family connections. " The school stressed religion and deportment, and she was once censured for the "indecorum" of running into the hall. This was the first of many indecorums of which Deland would be accused, as, through works both of fiction and of charity - her two central occupations - she extended her reputation for daring and resolution from her family circle to a vastly larger audience.
Career
Deland returned home from Pelham Priory at the end of a year, determined to live independent of family authority, and in 1875 she was allowed to go to New York City to study art and design at Cooper Union. The next year, by way of a competitive examination, she received an appointment as an assistant instructor of drawing and design at the Normal College of the City of New York (later Hunter College), where she taught for nearly four years.
She had often written poems for her own pleasure, but her entrance into the literary world came about by chance when a friend, without her knowledge, took some of her poems to the editor of Harper's Magazine, which published them. Encouraged, she continued to write, and in 1886 Houghton, Mifflin & Company published a collection of her poems, The Old Garden, which had a good sale. Urged by her husband to try her hand at fiction, Deland had by this time begun writing a novel on a theme which had long preoccupied her: the consequences of fanatic Calvinism. John Ward, Preacher (1888) portrays a zealot who in carrying Calvinist dogma to its logical end is driven to sacrifice his beloved wife because she is unable to embrace the doctrine of reprobation. Conventionally written, the novel exhibits Deland's skill in devising a complex plot to illustrate those doctrinal intricacies that she hoped to condemn.
Two later novels in a similar vein, The Awakening of Helena Richie (1906) and The Iron Woman (1911), also received considerable reclame.
Collected in Old Chester Tales (1898), Dr. Lavendar's People (1903), and other volumes, these stories won Deland a devoted following in the two decades before the First World War. Her autobiographical volumes, If This Be I (1935) and Golden Yesterdays (1941), still warrant attention as a record of the many transformations of American social history during the nearly eighty years of her adult life.
She died in 1945 of coronary heart disease at her home in the Hotel Sheraton in Boston and was buried in Forest Hills Cemetery. At her death the New York Times wondered that the writings of this "mildest and most serene of gentlewomen" should have stirred up "such bitter and hostile feelings. " Twenty-five years after her death, she had almost disappeared from the standard studies of American literature, and it was necessary to recall from obscurity Deland's modest but permanent contribution to the long history of resistance to intolerance and cruelty in America.
Achievements
Works
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Religion
Deland was a Presbyterian.
Views
In her works, Deland's concern was solely with the moral issues in personal relationships. In none of her work did she strike a note of social protest. She was opposed to woman suffrage, and those of her heroines who imbibed the social philosophy of the Progressive era were presented with a touch of caricature. Her code of ethics was likewise traditional (she refused, for instance, to countenance divorce).
Connections
During a summer holiday in Vermont in 1878 she met Lorin Fuller Deland, the junior member of a Boston printing firm, Deland and Son. They were married on May 12, 1880, at her uncle's house in Fairfield, Pennsylvaniaa. Established in Boston, the Delands compromised their religious differences - he was a Unitarian, she a Presbyterian - by attending Episcopalian services at Trinity Church. Coming under the influence of its rector, Phillips Brooks, and his ideals of community and social service, the couple adopted a cause which at that time was widely regarded as shocking: helping unmarried mothers.
Themselves childless, the Delands took into their home both mothers and infants, in the belief that a fallen woman, if permitted to keep her child and allowed to become self-supporting, would be transformed, her life redeemed by the healing power of her infant's love. This theory was confirmed by considerable success among the some sixty girls whom they aided in this fashion over a period of four years.