Maria Graham: A Literary Biography By Regina Akel

In a poignant recollection Maria states that after many months of being ill, she came to accept death as a ‘release from a world which, excepting in my school days, had afforded me much more pain than pleasure and in which I thought myself not at all understood or appreciated’ (87). The last word of her declaration is the key to understand many of the unusual attitudes and notions that Maria adopted in later life: distrust of people, especially other women; the need to shine above others by her superior knowledge and intellect; the need also to appear distant and analytical in her writings and to avoid sentimentality.

The second consequence of her illness was her return to Richmond, as it was thought that another Scottish winter might further damage her health. Her uncle was pleasantly surprised at her recovery; her uncle’s wife, probably less so. We will never know the reason why this shadowy aunt by marriage, so like Jane Eyre’s Aunt Reed, felt such a strong dislike towards the young Maria.

During that time of forced loneliness, Maria read Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Burnett’s History of the Reformation, and the works of Shakespeare, Milton, Corneille, Racine, and Dante. It appears that her aunt did not want her to meet people of her own age, and those whom she did meet taunted and bullied her: ‘I mixed less with what might be called the world, and it seemed to me that it was my aunt’s design that it should be so’ (91), Maria confesses at the end of her memoir. She was compensated, nevertheless, by the respectful attention her uncle and some of his friends paid her.