McINTOSH, Maria Jane

Born 1803, Sunbury, Georgia; died 25 February 1878, Morristown, New Jersey

Also wrote under: Aunt Kitty, Cousin Kate, M. J. McIntosh, Maria J. McIntosh

Daughter of Lachlan McIntosh and Mary Moore Maxwell McIntosh

Maria Jane McIntosh was educated at home, at a coeducational academy in Sunbury, and at Baisden's Bluff Academy in McIntosh County. A descendant of the powerful McIntosh clan in Scotland, McIntosh exhibited in her life a self-reliance akin to the moral independence she sets as a standard for the heroines of her novels. Her father, a lawyer, died when McIntosh was only a few years old, and on the death of her invalid mother in 1823, the young McIntosh took over the management of the family estate. Moving to New York in 1835, McIntosh sold her property and invested in New York securities, only to lose her substantial fortune in the 1837 business crisis.

Setting out to make her living by writing, McIntosh published the first of her series of moralistic children's stories in 1841 and the first of her eight novels in 1843. During her prolific writing career she published 24 books, which, popular in England and France as well as in America, eventually made her self-supporting.

Conquest and Self-Conquest (1843), McIntosh's first novel, traces the lives of Frederic Stanley and his friend from the time they are schoolboys through their early adventures as midshipmen in the navy. Conceived by McIntosh as "a history of the mind," the novel presents parallel incidents contrasting Frederic's control and his friend's lack of control of the "rash passions" that lead to "wrong-doing"—in this case fighting, gambling, and drinking. The abstemious Frederic rescues his lady love from pirates and is rewarded by her hand and a state ceremony in his honor, while his friend, lacking Frederic's self-control, is invalided home. Frederic sums up the novel's moral when he explains to his disappointed friend that what makes the true hero is "not conquest over others…but self-conquest." For the most part McIntosh's subordination of character and plot to her didactic purpose results in a tract-like work that is predictably boring.

Woman, an Enigma (1843) again focuses on development of self-control in a young person, but here McIntosh is concerned with a young woman's purposeful direction of her life. Set in 18th-century France and England, the novel traces the life of Louise de La Valliere, a convent-bred seventeen-year-old who suddenly becomes an heiress and the betrothed of a jaded marquis. She adopts the philosophy that "a wife's best talisman for the preservation of peace and purity lay in her devotion to her husband." The result is disastrous: the pair are embroiled in five years of misunderstandings, intrigues, and separations. Suffering forces Louise into action, led by duty and a sense of right, not by a desire to please her husband. McIntosh's thesis is that the inconsistencies criticized in women stem from their failure to have a purpose in life other than to please men. This work is as didactic as McIntosh's first novel, but Louise's development of a purpose in life makes for more interesting reading than does Frederic's abstinence.

Two Lives (1846), the first work McIntosh published under her real name, combines the parallel structure of her first novel with the theme of her second novel: the need for women to be independent of men in the spiritual purpose that guides their everyday life. The lovely Grace Elliot "has no fixed principle but the desire to please," whereas her equally lovely but solemn cousin Isabel adheres to "the unchanging and eternal principles of right." Grace's fiancé leaves her when he realizes that "To seem what I wished has been her effort, and how shall I know that her whole life is not seeming." Straitlaced Isabel is an unappealing character, but McIntosh's insight into her coldness and into Grace's desire to please occasionally cuts through the novel's sentimentality and sermonizing.

Charms and Counter-Charms (1848), the most popular of McIntosh's novels, traces the development of Evelyn Beresford, a young woman very like Grace Elliot and Louise de La Valliere in that "she is as wax in the hands of those she loves." McIntosh structures the novel on parallels, setting Evelyn's trials with her dashing husband, Euston, an "unbeliever" and a "libertine," against her friend Mary's relationship with the exemplary Everard. The novel focuses on what undoubtedly made it a bestseller: the sado-masochistic relationship between Evelyn and Euston. He repeatedly rejects her for another woman so that, at any sign of unhappiness, he can punish her with coldness. When they are eventually reconciled, Evelyn has become less dependent on his love, but the real change is in Euston. Euston represents an excess of the self-control McIntosh praises in her other novels, and her sympathetic insight into his distaste for emotional intimacy adds psychological realism to her portrayal of his and Evelyn's relationship.

McIntosh's insight into the emotions of her characters only occasionally transcends her rigid parallelism of plot and characters, her sentimentality, and her didacticism. McIntosh's thematic variations on self-control in her novels are interesting in the context of her life. What is most interesting about her works, however, is that, although her treatise Woman in America: Her Work and Her Reward (1850) asserts that woman's role is to be a mother, her novels preach a different message: the need for women to be guided not by a desire to please men, but by their own sense of right.

Other Works:

Blind Alice; or, Do Right If You Wish to Be Happy (1841). Florence Arnott; or, Is She Generous? (1841). Jessie Graham; or, Friends Dear, but Truth Dearer (1841). Ellen Leslie; or, The Reward of Self-Control (1842). Grace and Clara; or, Be Just as Well as Generous (1842). The Cousins: A Tale of Early Life (1845). Praise and Principle; or, For What Shall I Live? (1845). Aunt Kitty's Tales (1847). The Christmas Guest; or, Evenings at Donaldson Manor (1853). Meta Gray; or, WhatMakes Home Happy (1853). Letter on the Address of the Women of England to Their Sisters of America, in Relation to Slavery (1853). The Lofty and the Lowly; or, Good in All and None All-Good (1853). Alice Montrose: A Tale (1855). Rose and Lillie Stanhope; or, The Power of Conscience (1855). Violet; or, The Cross and the Crown (1856). Maggie and Emma: A True Story (1861). Two Pictures; or, What We Think of Ourselves and What the World Thinks of Us (1863). Violetta and I (1870). The Children's Mirror: A Treasury of Stories (1887). Emily Herbert; or, The Happy Home (n.d.).

Bibliography:

Baym, N., Women's Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820-1870 (1978). Forrest, M., Women of the South Distinguished in Literature (1861).

Reference works:

A Critical Dictionary of English Literature. The Female Prose Writers of English Literature. The Living Female Writers of the South. NAW. The Twentieth Century Biographical Dictionary of Notable Americans. Woman's Record.

—MARTHA CHEW