Maria Graham: A Literary Biography By Regina Akel

Up to this point, Maria Graham’s account provides a Romanticised view of childhood, with the suggestion of freedom, fondness for stories, and fascination for the supernatural. This representation makes the first dramatic event of her life appear impressive and mysterious as she, the focaliser, provides only the perceptions that a young child would have had at the moment. The rest has to be completed by the reader, who is thus doubly affected, first by the pitiful situation and second by the lack of awareness of the protagonist.

One spring day, when she was barely eight years old, Maria relates, her father returns home after a long absence, looking grim. A few days later, she finds out that she is going to Liverpool with her father to visit, she believes, friends of the family and she wonders ‘why [her] mother would weep so bitterly as she did’ (9) at such a normal occurrence. At the start of this journey Maria makes the natural scenery a fitting backcloth for the first painful event of her life:

In this and the following excerpt, Maria portrays the feelings she would have experienced, had she been able to grasp the reality of her situation, through the forces of nature that are at the moment acting out the feelings of her mother. There are few other passages in ‘Reminiscences’ in which the objective correlative plays such an important part in the narrative, but also, there are no other passages that surpass this one in dramatic intensity. The depiction of the scene, the sequence and timing of the actions, and even the concluding sentence of the passage are Romantic and novelistic. The story continues, and as she and her father are about to board the London coach the following night,