Alone - 1856 Author:Marion Harland This volume was published in 1856. — Very few women and even fewer men still remember Mary — Vigrginia Hawes Terhune, alias "Marion Harland". She was, — however, a Virginia Presbyterian woman who, as a very — young woman, helped shape the lives of American women, — indeed, women of the world, long before Martha Stewart of — recent notoriety. She did... more » this as a storyteller and especially
with her household advice, which she shared with other
women around the globe. She was a biblical "Martha" as well as a "Mary".
Mary Virginia was born 175 years ago in Amelia County, Va.,
daughter of Samuel Hawes, a migrant to the South from
Massachusetts, and Judith Anna Smith, daughter of well-to-do
planters. She received a first rate classical education from
tutors, and at a Presbyterian girls seminary in Richmond where
The Hawes family attended the Second Presbyterian Church
and listened to the preaching of the noted Moses Drury Hog.
Precocious from the beginning, she began to write and publish
stories for a denominational journal. At the age of twenty-
four she published a novel entitled "Alone" under the pseudonym,
"Marion Harland", by which she became known and we shall
employ here.
In "Alone", her heroine starts out as an orphan, grows to matur-
ity, marries and becomes a women's woman, according to the
storyteller. As a matter of fact, Harland did not like her book
being labeled a novel. It was, in fact, a "story", autobiograph-
ical and very religious. Her namesake, heroine Ida Ross, grows
up and stands up to her own problems and those of others
because of her Christian convictions. With the help of Jesus
Christ she finds solutions for the trouble of other women --- the
most putdown daughters, sisters, wives, mothers - everyday
common women some of whom are good-looking, not so good-
looking, well off and not-so-well off, some who were lucky and
some who even had bad tempers. Harland depicted Christian
women as strong domestic goddesses, and religious guardians
of husbands and children. Through her characters, Harland
showed the women could be a strong force for good in local
communities and in the larger republic.
Ida's devout preaching by example not only influenced women,
but converted recalcitrant men, thus making the entire environ-
ment in which they lived one of Christian love and respect. The
rays of a woman's halo, she claimed, could reach beyond the
home into the wider world. Although "Alone" was mostly
sweetness and light with no real villains, the author did include
for didactic purposes references to a duel which took place in
Richmond during the 1840's between two newspaper editors
over the issue of slavery. Harland uses the death scene to
condemn this sin against God's gift of life, and also includes in
her presentation of this historical drama an eleventh hour con-
version experience.
Harland?s "Alone" made her reputation. During the rest of her life she was anything but alone. But she lived up to her namesake
as a Mary. She continued her writing of stories and novels and emerged as a ?New Star of the South.? She saw herself as an
all-American author. And she became a true household word,
Marion Harland's novels are mostly antebellum plantation romances, her stories featured heroines who were exemplary domestic women, never independent but always capable.
Forgotten today by all but a handful of women's domestic and literary historians, Marion Harland (1830-1922) was one of the best known American women in the nineteenth century. She was the author of some 75 works of fiction and domestic advice, hundreds of magazine articles and short stories, and a series of syndicated newspaper advice columns. It is not extravagant to say that Marion Harland was, for many readers, the Julia Child, Danielle Steel, and Dear Abby of her day.« less