Holmes, Mary Jane Hawes

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HOLMES, Mary Jane Hawes

Born 5 April 1825, Brookfield, Massachusetts; died 6 October 1907, Brockport, New York

Daughter of Preston and Fanny Olds Hawes; married Daniel Holmes, 1849

Mary Jane Hawes Holmes was the author of 39 novels and numerous stories and essays published in periodicals. Her uncle, Joel Hawes, was a well-known New England essayist and preacher whose influence may have contributed to the moral tone of her books. Encouraged by both parents in intellectual and literary pursuits, Holmes entered school at the age of three and at thirteen was teaching in a district school. She published her first story before she was sixteen. With her husband, a Brockport, New York, attorney, Holmes moved to Versailles, Kentucky, for a short period; later that area provided the Southern rural background of her first novel, Tempest and Sunshine (1854). The couple then made their permanent home in Brockport.

Childless, Holmes spent her years writing and traveling. While producing novels at the rate of about one a year, she visited such distant places as England, France, Russia, the Mediterranean, and the Far East, gathering statuary, paintings, tapestries, and furniture on her travels. Generous with both her time and her money, she entertained young girls of the neighborhood with talks on her travels and on the art she collected; she also taught Sunday school, built the parish house for her church, was active in the temperance movement, gave financial aid to dependents of Civil War veterans, and paid for the education of two young Japanese girls.

Though now depreciated for being a writer of mawkishly sentimental, simplistically didactic domestic tales, Holmes was an author whose works had enormous appeal for the unsophisticated reader of her time. Some individual titles sold over 50,000 copies and during her lifetime her book sales totaled more than 2,000,000 copies. In 1870 a writer in Appleton's Journal claimed Holmes had "an immense constituency outlying in all the small towns and rural districts." Indeed, small-town and rural life was what she knew best, and it was this life that provided the background for most of her stories.

Typical of her work is her first, and most popular, novel, Tempest and Sunshine. The central characters are two young sisters, Julia and Fanny Middleton, who live on a farm about 12 miles from Frankfort, Kentucky. The plot revolves around the courtship complications of several young people, including the sisters, and is filled with such contrivances as intercepted letters, coincidental relationships, and long-lost brothers newly found.

The emphasis, however, is upon the contrast of the personalities of the sisters. Fanny, the angelic "Sunshine" of the title, named after Holmes' own mother, is all purity and kindness, while Julia, "Tempest," is hot-tempered, deceitful, and cruel. When Fanny becomes engaged to a New Orleans doctor whom Julia wants for herself, "Tempest" intercepts their letters and forges others, which destroy the relationship. Finally, in true domestic novel fashion, goodness and justice triumph, and all the young people are happily paired off except the repentant Julia, who remains at home to care for her aged father. Although both Fanny's angelic nature and Julia's conversion strain the modern reader's credulity, the portraits of some of the minor characters, especially the girls' roughhewn father, are picturesque and vivid. Furthermore, the portraits of the two sisters echo the light-maiden, dark-maiden motif identified by many critics in the works of Cooper, Hawthorne, and other 19th-century American writers.

Holmes' 1856 novel, Lena Rivers, was second to Tempest and Sunshine in sales. Other popular titles were Meadow Brook (1857), Marian Grey (1863), and Ethelyn's Mistake (1869). Many of her novels were issued as serials in the New York Weekly. Though her stories were derivative and the situations contrived, Holmes' strength as a writer lay in her portraits of rural domestic life and in the straightforward simplicity of both her style and her moral code.

Other Works:

The English Orphans (1855). The Homestead on the Hillside, and Other Tales (1856). Dora Deane (1858). Maggie Miller (1858). Cousin Maude (1860). Rosamond (1860). Hugh Worthington (1863). Darkness and Daylight (1864). The Cameron Pride (1867). Rose Mather (1868). Millbank (1871). Edna Browning (1872). West Lawn (1874). Edith Lyle (1876). Mildred (1877). Daisy Thornton (1878). Forest House (1879). Chateau D'Or (1880). Red Bird (1880). Madeline (1881). Queenie Hetherton (1883). Bessie's Fortune (1885). Gretchen (1887). Marguerite (1890). Dr. Hathern's Daughters: A Story of Virginia, in Four Parts (1895). Paul Ralston (1897). The Tracy Diamonds (1899). The Cromptons (1902). The Merivale Banks (1903). Rena's Experiment (1904). The Abandoned Farm (1905). Connie's Mistake (1905).