Maria Graham: A Literary Biography By Regina Akel

Chapter 1:

The Early Years

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Chapter 1

The Early Years

The only source available for Maria Graham’s childhood and youth is ‘Reminiscences’, the memoir she dictated between 1836 and 1842. This autobiographical fragment covers the first seventeen years of her life and portrays her as the sole heroine of her journey into the past. Perhaps better than any other of the texts she composed,¹ Maria Graham’s ‘Reminiscences’ illustrates her capacity for organising and controlling plots and characters. Even though this memoir claims to be a true relation of her early life, her narrative style displays an effective management of fictional devices such as focalisation, characterisation, suspense, and pathos. As Jennifer Hayward rightly indicates, her protagonist goes through experiences similar to the ones the small Jane in Jane Eyre (1847) endured years later:

Both Bronte and Graham created girl-protagonists shunned by snobbish upper-class families and abandoned in boarding schools that initially seemed cruel; both young heroines managed to find female mentors and develop strong intellectual interests despite their circumstances; both defied the gender codes of the time to find professions for themselves; both served briefly as governesses. (xiv)