Mary MacLane

MacLane was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada in 1881,[4] but her family moved to the Red River area of Minnesota, settling in Fergus Falls, which her father helped develop. After his death in 1889, her mother remarried a family friend and lawyer, H. Gysbert Klenze. Soon after, the family moved to Montana, first settling in Great Falls and finally in Butte, where Klenze drained the family funds pursuing mining and other ventures. MacLane spent the remainder of her life in the United States. She began writing for her school paper in 1898.[5]

MacLane depicted on inside cover of a 1902 edition of The Story of Mary MacLane

From the beginning, MacLane's writing was characterized by a direct, fiery, individualistic style. She was, however, also influenced by such American regional realists as John Townsend Trowbridge (with whom she exchanged a few letters), Maria Louise Pool, and Hamlin Garland.

In 1901, MacLane wrote her first book, which she originally titled I Await the Devil's Coming. Prior to the manuscript's printing the following year, MacLane's publisher, Herbert S. Stone & Company, altered the title to The Story of Mary MacLane. The book proved to be an immediate success, especially among young women, selling over 100,000 copies during its first month of release.[6] It, however, was pilloried by conservative critics and readers, and even lightly ridiculed by H. L. Mencken.

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.

Her second book, My Friend Annabel Lee, was published by Stone in 1903. More experimental in style than her debut book, it was not as sensational, though MacLane was said to have made a fairly large amount of money.

Her final book, I, Mary Maclane: A Diary of Human Days was published by Frederick A. Stokes in 1917 and sold moderately well but may have been overshadowed by America's recent entry into World War I.

In 1917, she wrote and starred in the 90-minute autobiographical silent film titled Men Who Have Made Love to Me,[7] for Essanay Studios. Produced by film pioneer George Kirke Spoor and based on MacLane's 1910 article of the same title for a Butte newspaper, it has been speculated to have been an extremely early, if not the earliest, sustained breaking of the fourth wall in cinema, with the writer-star directly addressing the audience. Though stills and some subtitles have survived, the film is now believed to be lost.

Among the numerous authors who referenced, parodied, or answered MacLane were Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Harriet Monroe, lawyer Clarence Darrow, Ring Lardner Jr., Sherwood Anderson and Daniel Clowes in Ice Haven. Gertrude Sanborn published an optimistic riposte to MacLane's 1917 I, Mary MacLane under the title I, Citizen of Eternity (1920).

MacLane had always chafed, or felt, "anxiety of place",[2] at living in Butte, a mining city far from cultural centers, and used the money from her first book's sales to travel to Chicago and then throughout the East Coast. She lived in Rockland, Massachusetts, wintering in St. Augustine, Florida, from 1903 to 1908, then in Greenwich Village from 1908 to 1909, where she continued writing and, by her later published accounts, living a decadent and Bohemian existence. She was close friends with the feminist writer Inez Haynes Irwin, who is referenced in some of MacLane's 1910 writing in a Butte newspaper and who in turn mentioned MacLane in a 1911 magazine article.

For a period, she lived with her friend Caroline M. Branson, who had been the long-time companion of Maria Louise Pool until the latter's death in 1898. They lived in the Rockland's house that Pool left to Branson. Mary Maclane also had a multi-decade friendship with Harriet Monroe.

MacLane died in Chicago in early August 1929, aged 48. She was less frequently discussed through the mid to late 20th century, and her prose remained out of print until late 1993, when The Story of Mary MacLane and some of her newspaper feature work was republished in Tender Darkness: A Mary MacLane Anthology.

In 2011, the publisher of Tender Darkness (1993) published an expanded anthology titled Human Days: A Mary MacLane Reader (with a Foreword by Bojana Novakovic).

In 2011, Novakovic wrote and performed "The Story of Mary MacLane – By Herself" in Melbourne, Australia, which was subsequently staged in Sydney, Australia in 2012.

In the 2010s, MacLane's work was translated into French, Danish, and Spanish. A German edition was published in 2020.

The 2020 novel Plain Bad Heroines features MacLane's life and work as a recurring interest for multiple characters in the book, which draws its title from a passage from MacLane's The Story of Mary MacLane.[8]

• Halverson, Cathryn. "The Devil and Desire in Butte, Montana." In Maverick Autobiographies: Women Writers and the American West, 1900-1936. Wisconsin Studies in Autobiography series, William L. Andrews, general editor. University of Wisconsin Press, 2004. Borrowable at Internet Archive.
• Mattern, Carolyn J., "Mary MacLane: A Feminist Opinion", Montana The Magazine of Western History, 27 (Autumn 1977), 54–63.
• Miller, Barbara, "'Hot as Live Embers—Cold as Hail': The Restless Soul of Butte's Mary MacLane", Montana Magazine, September 1982, 50–53.
• Terris, Virginia R., "Mary MacLane—Realist", The Speculator, Summer 1985, 42–49.
• Wheeler, Leslie A., "Montana's Shocking 'Lit'ry Lady'", Montana The Magazine of Western History, 27 (Summer 1977), 20–33.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Mary MacLane.

Wikisource has original works by or about:
Mary MacLane

• Website with biography, photos, private letters, reviews
• Encyclopædia Britannica article by Julia Watson
• 2013 Atlantic article by Hope Reese
• 2013 New Yorker article
• Works by Mary MacLane at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Mary MacLane at Internet Archive
• Works by Mary MacLane at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• Mary Maclane at Women Film Pioneers Project