Maria Graham: A Literary Biography By Regina Akel

Chapter 1:

The Early Years

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Miss Bright’s hair, partly grey, was frizzed in front and turned up behind in a shape called chignon, not unlike that of a knocker of a door. The hair was very partially powdered and very unevenly frizzed. A cap and a black hat finished her head-dress, but they were generally too backward or too forward, or too far to the right, or too far to the left…Her pocket was generally so full of things that she put there in her absence of mind, that she looked as if she had a hoop on. (28–29)

The two sisters are almost exact opposites, the former pupil implies, even in the kind of shoes they wear. Miss Bright’s heels are ‘not above an inch in height’, she reports,

far different from Miss Mary’s which were the highest I ever saw, and so slender that it has always been a marvel to me how she walked. Her hair was in the neatest order, beautifully frizzed and delicately powdered, and hung down her back, confined only by a slider. Her cap border was laid in the nicest plaits. Her hat had a broad Leghorn brim, bound with green satin and a crown and bows of the same. (29)

The physical appearance of the two sisters continues with a detailed, contrasting description of every item of dress and the manner in which it is arranged. What comes out of Maria’s account is a portrait of the elder sister as slightly ridiculous but endearing, and of the younger as perhaps too concerned with her appearance. There is also rigidity in the disposition of the different items of Miss Mary’s dress that suggests something more sinister, as perhaps the ‘bad’ fairy in a children’s story:

Her precise dress and her diminutive upright figure always put me in the mind of some fairy, and the tapping of her little shoe-heels as she trotted about the house, and which was always heard whether we saw her or not, gave me a feeling that she was present though invisible. (Ibid; emphasis added)

Maria Graham is here adhering to the common conceit that women who are too pretty or too concerned with physical appearances are superficial; to this she adds her teacher’s almost supernatural power to be everywhere and the indication that her presence was not quite benign and not always welcome, like that of a bad fairy.