Terhune, Mary Virginia (1830–1922)

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Terhune, Mary Virginia (1830–1922)

American novelist. Name variations: Mrs. E.P. Terhune; (pseudonym) Marion Harland. Born Mary Virginia Hawes on December 21, 1830, in Dennisville, Virginia; died on June 3, 1922, in New York, New York; daughter of Samuel Pierce Hawes (a merchant and magistrate) and Judith Anna (Smith) Hawes (direct descendant of Captain John Smith, the man who befriended Pocahontas ); married Edward Payson Terhune (a minister), on September 2, 1856 (died 1907); children: Edward Terhune (b. 1857); Christine Terhune Herrick (1859–1944, an author); Alice Terhune (b. 1863); Virginia Belle Terhune Van de Water (b. 1865, an author); Myrtle Terhune (b. 1869); Albert Payson Terhune (b. 1872, an author who married pianist Anice Morris Terhune ).

Served as a copy editor for Home-Maker (1888–90) and Housekeeper's Weekly; was a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities, and the Pocahontas Memorial Association.

Selected writings under pseudonym Marion Harland:

(novels) Alone; A Tale of Southern Life and Manners (1854), The Hidden Path (1856), Moss-Side (1857), Nemesis (1860), The Carringtons of High Hill (1919); (domestic advice books) Common Sense in the Household (1871), Dinner Year-Book (1878), Eve's Daughters (1882), Every Day Etiquette (1905); also published three collections of short stories.

Mary Virginia Terhune enjoyed a career as a home economics writer and novelist that spanned eight decades. She was born Mary Virginia Hawes in Amelia County, Virginia, in 1830, the third of nine children of Samuel Pierce Hawes and Judith Smith Hawes . Mary and her siblings received an excellent education from her father, a merchant who was related to Franklin Pierce, 14th president of the United States. He also hired tutors to give the children specialized instruction. Despite this encouragement, Judith Hawes did not approve of a woman pursuing a career and taught her girls to see homemaking as a woman's only proper role. In response to this position, Terhune kept secret from her parents the essays and short stories she composed.

In 1843, Terhune left home to attend classes in Prince Edward County, then spent a year at a Presbyterian girls' school in Richmond, Virginia. After her return home, she contributed stories anonymously to a weekly newspaper, but it was not until she was 23 years old that she earned any recognition for her work, when she won a prize offered by Southern Era for an article on temperance. At that point, Terhune enlisted the help of her father to privately publish her first full-length story, Alone, in 1854. It was sold to a New York publisher in 1856 to critical and popular acclaim (as was her second novel, The Hidden Path, which also appeared in 1856). Like most of Terhune's 25 novels, Alone was published under the name Marion Harland and concerned domestic life on a Southern plantation. Terhune's works were centered around female characters in their roles as wife and mother, and offered moral and religious lessons. New novels were published regularly between 1856 and 1873, and occasionally after that, making Marion Harland a household name among readers in the United States.

In 1856, Mary married a Presbyterian minister, Edward Payson Terhune, who was assigned to a local parish. It was a happy alliance, and Edward encouraged Mary's writing. The couple had two children before moving in 1859 to Newark, New Jersey, where four more children were born by 1872. Only three of the children survived to adulthood, all of them—Christine Terhune Herrick, Virginia Van de Water , and Albert Payson Terhune—eventually becoming writers as well.

As the wife of a parish minister, Mary Terhune had numerous responsibilities in addition to her obligations as a mother, yet she continued to publish frequently. While her earlier works were sentimental and romantic in tone, her later writings specifically attacked many of the goals of the emerging American woman's rights movement. Although Terhune did support a woman's right to higher education and thought women should be able to practice a profession if they had no husband or male family member to depend on, she maintained that marriage and motherhood were the ideal for all women.

Diagnosed with tuberculosis in the early 1870s, Terhune and her husband successfully sought a cure for the disease by traveling in Europe from 1876 to 1878. On their return to the East Coast, they settled first in Springfield, Massachusetts, then in Brooklyn, New York. At that time, Terhune began to concentrate on nonfiction, especially advice based on the new field of "domestic science," publishing books of domestic advice and household management for wives. Influenced by the immense cultural and social changes which followed the Civil War, Terhune tried to address the specific needs of professional women and those in the growing middle class. She also wrote magazine articles on homemaking, cooking, etiquette, and related topics.

In the 1880s, her consistently strong sales and common-sense advice led Terhune to accept the position of editor for two journals, House-keeper's Weekly and Home-maker. In 1900, she began to write a syndicated column of domestic advice which appeared in 27 daily newspapers across the United States, including the Chicago Tribune (1911–17). Widowed in 1907, Terhune wrote on a variety of topics in her last years, among them travelogues based on her experiences in Europe, biographical sketches of famous American women, and Southern genealogy and history. She also composed a book of her personal philosophy, Looking Westward, which appeared in 1914. However, she remained best known for her domestic advice books. Mary Virginia Terhune died in her Brooklyn home in 1922, age 91. She was buried in Pompton, New Jersey.