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Ten years later she recalled the dramatic scenes of her dismissal in a memoir that may have been an attempt to clarify the event. In time she returned to England and later married painter Augustus Wall Callcott. In her last phase, she wrote history books for children, books on art, articles for John Murray’s newspaper, the Representative, and even a treatise on botany. She died at her home in Kensington in November 1842.
The following account of her life and work, and the manner each impinged upon the other, explores the literary persona that emerges from Maria Graham’s pages. This figure speaks in a distinctive voice and displays an uncommon arrogance for a woman of her time. Invariably authoritative and formal, her voice projects the assertiveness of someone who has ample knowledge of the subjects in discussion and who is, besides, an upper-class member of the British Empire visiting foreign lands.
One distinctive feature of Maria Graham’s persona is that she appears markedly hostile to the women she meets on her travels. Her animosity surfaces in the manner in which she belittles them for their lack of beauty in some cases, for their poor intellectual capacities in others, or for what she believes is sexual deprivation in some, or sexual excesses in others. She treats herself differently, however. Maria never disguises the fact that she is a female author, but at the same time she disregards the constraints placed on women’s writings by tradition and the rules of society. In some instances she even defies them, as I point out in the account of her stay in India. There she discusses ‘unfeminine’ issues such as burial practices, the aspect of unburied bodies, and bloody human sacrifices.
Maria Graham’s relationship to the men in her life (not all of them romantic interests) has a marked influence on her style and on the manner in which she unfolds the narrative of her life. There is, for instance, the shadowy figure of her father, who appears in two key moments of her life story. The first time he arrives suddenly, breaks up her small girl’s world, abandons her for a time in the home of distant, unfriendly relatives, and eventually takes her to boarding school.