| Chapter 1: | The Early Years |
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Although Maria Graham herself does not say it, the text suggests that she never saw her mother again. Rosamund Brunel Gotch indicates that the mother died soon after this moving parting scene (16), which becomes intensified by the strength of the feelings displayed, by the force of the storm, and by the depiction of Maria’s childish self as unaware of the reality of her situation. Children losing their mother was a common occurrence in the nineteenth century, in real life as well as in fiction,2 at a time when so many women died in childbirth. The relation of this part of Maria Graham’s life is not exceptional; what is worth noticing is the manner in which the story is told, with the use of the storm as a metaphor for feelings in turmoil, the vivid description of the parting between mother and child, and the situation of the narrator as only partially aware and of the reader as omniscient in this case.3 It is the reader, therefore, who has to complete the narrative from the information the protagonist inadvertently provides.
Before she is taken to school, Maria goes to London to visit relatives. There she finds herself at a disadvantage, both physically and morally, next to her cousin Mary who is good, beautiful, and elegant: