Mary MacLane

Mary MacLane, 1911

Mary MacLane (May 1, 1881 — August 1929) was a controversial Canadian-born American writer whose frank memoirs helped usher in the confessional style of autobiographical writing. MacLane was known as the "Wild Woman of Butte".

MacLane was a very popular author for her time, scandalizing the populace with her shocking bestselling first memoir and to a lesser extent her two following books. She was considered wild and uncontrolled, a reputation she nurtured, and was openly bisexual as well as a vocal feminist. In her writings, she compared herself to another frank young memoirist, Marie Bashkirtseff, who died a few years after MacLane was born, and H. L. Mencken called her, "the Butte Bashkirtseff."

Early life and popularity

MacLane was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada in 1881, but her family moved to the Red River area of Minnesota, settling in Fergus Falls, which her father helped develop. After her father's death in 1889, her mother remarried a family friend and lawyer, H. Gysbert Klenze, and soon after the family moved to Montana, first settling in Great Falls and finally in Butte, where Klenze drained the family fund pursuing mining and other ventures. She spent the remainder of her life in the United States. MacLane began writing published material for her school paper in 1898. From the beginning, her writing was characterized by a direct, fiery and highly individualistic style. She was, however, also strongly influenced by such American regional realists as John Townsend Trowbridge (with whom she exchanged a few letters), Maria Louise Pool, and Hamlin Garland.

At the age of 19 in 1902, MacLane published her first book, The Story of Mary MacLane. It sold 100,000 copies in the first month and was popular among young girls, but was pilloried by conservative critics and readers, and lightly ridiculed by H. L. Mencken. Rather than embodied she had always chafed, or felt, "anxiety of place," at living in Butte, which was a mining town far off from the centers of culture, and used the money from her first book's sales of this book to travel to Chicago, then Massachusetts, settling for a time in Rockland, Massachusetts from 1903–1908 and then in Greenwich Village from 1908–1909, where she continued writing and, by her own account, living a decadent and Bohemian existence. She was close friends with feminist writer Inez Haynes Irwin, who is mentioned in MacLane's private correspondence and appears in some of MacLane's 1910 newspaper writing in a Butte paper.

Some critics have suggested that even by today's standards, MacLane's writing is raw, honest, unflinching, self-aware, sensual and extreme. She wrote openly about egoism and her own self-love, about sexual attraction and love for other women, and even about her desire to marry the Devil.

In 1917 she wrote and starred in an autobiographical silent film titled Men Who Have Made Love to Me - now believed to be lost to time.

Among the numerous authors who referenced, parodied or answered MacLane was Gertrude Sanborn, who published an optimistic riposte to MacLane's 1917 memoir I, Mary MacLane under the title I, Citizen of Eternity (1920).

MacLane died in Chicago sometime in early August 1929, aged 48. She was soon forgotten and her body of prose remained out of print until late 1993, when The Story of Mary MacLane and some of her newspaper feature work was republished in an anthology titled Tender Darkness in 1993.

Human Days: A Mary MacLane Reader

In January 2011, the publisher of Tender Darkness (1993) announced forthcoming publication of an integrated complete-works anthology and biographical study of MacLane. The first volume, Human Days: A Mary MacLane Reader (with Foreword by Bojana Novakovic), is scheduled for publication in late 2011. The second volume, A Quite Unusual Intensity of Life: A Mary MacLane Companion, also issued under the Petrarca Press logo, is to be published in late 2012. The two volumes are to total 1200+ pages.

Bibliography

Books

• The Story of Mary MacLane (1902)
• My Friend, Annabel Lee (1903)
• I, Mary MacLane: A Diary of Human Days (1917)
• Tender Darkness (reprint anthology) (1993)
• The Story of Mary MacLane and Other Writings (reprint anthology) (1999)
• Human Days: A Mary MacLane Anthology (Foreword by Bojana Novakovic) (late 2011)
• A Quite Unusual Intensity of Life: A Mary MacLane Companion (forthcoming, late 2012)

Selected articles

• Consider Thy Youth and Therein (1899)
• Mary MacLane at Newport (1902)
• Mary MacLane on Wall Street (1902)
• Mary MacLane in Little Old New York (1902)
• On Marriage (1902)
• Mary MacLane Soliloquizes on Scarlet Fever (1910)
• Mary MacLane Meets the Vampire on the Isle of Treacherous Delights (1910)
• Mary MacLane Wants a Vote - For the Other Woman (1910)
• Woman and the Cigarette (1911)
• Mary MacLane Says - (1911)
• Mary MacLane on Marriage (1917)

Screenplays and Filmography

• Men Who Have Made Love to Me (1917)

Further reading

• Leslie A. Wheeler, "Montana's Shocking 'Lit'ry Lady'", Montana The Magazine of Western History, 27 (Summer 1977), 20-33.
• Carolyn J. Mattern, "Mary MacLane: A Feminist Opinion", Montana The Magazine of Western History, 27 (Autumn 1977), 54-63.
• Barbara Miller, "'Hot as Live Embers--Cold as Hail': The Restless Soul of Butte's Mary MacLane", Montana Magazine, September 1982, 50-53.
• Virginia R. Terris, "Mary MacLane--Realist", The Speculator, Summer 1985, 42-49.

External links

• "Mary MacLane's Story to be Told At Last" - 2011 press release for forthcoming multi-volume set
• Introduction to Tender Darkness: A Mary MacLane Anthology - by Elisabeth Pruitt
• marymaclane.com - Website maintained by the publisher of Tender Darkness, Michael Brown
• Hot Love, Sexual radicals bookend the century - by Carol Lynn Mithers