| Chapter 1: | The Early Years |
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This is a cruel thing to say to any child, and it is not surprising that Maria Graham remembered it even at the end of her life. She ensures that her memoir relates her sufferings through both lack of affection during her childhood and lack of understanding of her intellectual leanings during her adolescence—leanings that were not considered appropriate for a woman of her day.
These convictions were accompanied by even crueller actions, as when she reports that her relatives burned a poem she had written, claiming that it reflected ‘a disposition towards pursuits incompatible with the homely duties to be followed by the daughter of so poor a man as my father’ (31). At this stage in her memoir Maria Graham includes a statement that may be considered the ruling precept of her life:
Although at this stage she was recollecting the past from the vantage point of maturity, Maria may have been speaking in general terms but actually thinking about the years she lived in Scotland after her marriage to Thomas Graham. Her journals and letters of that period speak of boredom, hard manual work, and scarcity of funds. In any case, her manifesto was not shared by the male novelists of the nineteenth century, such as Thackeray or Dickens, whose heroines are excellent housewives. By contrast, these words could well have been spoken by Jane Eyre. Her viewpoint shows how well in tune with, or even ahead of, her time Maria Graham was. This also explains the concern she showed in her travels for libraries, books, newspapers, the theatre, and all sorts of cultural manifestations, as well as her disdain for women who are simply satisfied with personal beauty and with elements of female ornamentation, or what she terms ‘the pleasures of the world’.