|
|
Her story, however, is as remarkable as her work, and this biography not only narrates her life but also delves into the representation she made of herself in her published and unpublished journals, diaries, memoirs, and letters. The result of her endeavours is a literary persona that appears far removed from the controversial woman that was the flesh and blood Maria Graham.
Who is the woman behind the texts? How did she conceive them? Was she simply one of many other adventurous and articulate female authors of the nineteenth century, or did she for some reason stand apart? This book shows how she manufactured her identity at times by conforming to, challenging, or ignoring the rules of society regarding women’s behaviour. She was a child of the Enlightenment in that she valued knowledge above all things, yet she flavoured her discoveries with a taste of Romanticism. Her search took her to distant lands where she captured for her readers foreign cultural manifestations, exotic landscapes, and obscure religious rites; yet a reading of her work generates the impression that despite the dramatic descriptions of peoples and places, Maria’s subject was, simply, herself. What we know of her story comes mainly from her own narratives, although there are significant letters to, from, and about her that round up the analysis.
Maria Dundas was born in Papcastle (Lake District) in 1785, the daughter of a naval officer and a Miss Thompson from Liverpool. After an apparently happy and uneventful childhood, she was suddenly separated from her mother and taken to live in Richmond with relatives who, according to her memoir, both despised and rejected her. Maria became rebellious later on, when she was sent to school, although it was also there that she acquired her love of learning and the power to look at herself and others dispassionately. This trait may have influenced the choice of the literary genre she practiced at the beginning of her career: travel writing.
After she left school Maria went to live in Edinburgh with more congenial relations, a circumstance that allowed her to interact with figures of the Scottish Enlightenment.