Pike, Mary (1824–1908)

American author. Name variations: (pseudonyms) Mary Langdon and Sydney A. Story, Jr. Born Mary Hayden Green on November 30, 1824, in Eastport, Maine; died on January 15, 1908, in Baltimore, Maryland; first of six children of Elijah Dix Green (a bank director and colonel of militia) and Hannah Claflin (Hayden) Green; attended the Female Seminary, Charlestown, Massachusetts; married Frederick Augustus Pike (a lawyer and politician), on September 28, 1845 (died 1886); children: one adopted daughter.

The eldest of six children, Mary Pike was born in Eastport, Maine, in 1824, but grew up in nearby Calais, where her father was a deacon in the Baptist church, the director of the Washington County Bank, and a colonel of militia. Pike attended local schools and in 1840 entered the Female Seminary of Charlestown, Massachusetts, where she undertook a three-year course. In September 1845, she married Frederick Augustus Pike, a Calais lawyer who would later enter politics. The couple had no children of their own, but adopted a daughter.

In 1854, Pike published the first of her two antislavery novels, Ida May, the melodramatic story of a white child kidnapped into slavery, written under the pseudonym Mary Langdon. The book, following closely on the heels of Harriet Beecher Stowe 's popular Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), enjoyed immediate success, selling 60,000 copies in less than two years and generating several British editions. Pike's second novel, Caste: A Story of Republican Equality, concerning a quadroon forbidden to marry a white man, was published in 1856, under the pseudonym Sydney A. Story, Jr. While it was not as successful as her first effort, Caste was well received by critics and readers. She wrote another novel, Agnes (1858), before abandoning writing to take up landscape painting.

From 1861 to 1869, during Frederick's terms in Congress, the Pikes lived in Washington, D.C. They then spent several years in Europe before returning to Calais. Following her husband's death in 1886, Pike lived in Plainfield, New Jersey, devoting her later years to charitable and religious work. She died on January 15, 1908.

sources:

James, Edward T., ed. Notable American Women, 1607–1950. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971.

Mainiero, Lina, ed. American Women Writers: From Colonial Times to the Present. NY: Frederick Ungar, 1981.

McHenry, Robert, ed. Famous American Women. NY: Dover, 1980.

Barbara Morgan , Melrose, Massachusetts