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She does not see him again until many years later, when he appears in the India diary as the authoritarian figure of a Victorian melodrama. Interestingly, her father’s is the only figure in the story that is always silent; it is his actions that cause Maria so much distress.
Thomas Graham, Maria’s first husband, appears for the first time in the India diary of 1808. He is a fellow passenger on the voyage to India that year, and the discovery of the affection they feel for each other is narrated in the diary with an unusual reversal of roles, during a scene where the woman controls the situation and the man waits, in trembling expectation. However, the man who has the greatest influence on Maria’s style and focus is Lord Thomas Cochrane. Although she is little more than a footnote in the many versions of his life story, he figures crucially in hers. Lord Cochrane is definitely the man responsible for the textual strategies that altered the Chilean landscape and biased Maria’s version of the history of Chile in her journal about that country. These instances, which are also significant to the narrative of Maria’s life and the manner in which she recreated it in her work, are discussed in detail in chapters 6 and 7.
The figure of Pedro I, Emperor of Brazil, does not influence the narrative; it is his character that suffers transformations according to the manner he behaves towards the protagonist. From a dashing prince in Maria’s first and second visits to Brazil, he is transformed into a hysterical and grotesque individual in the narrative of the third visit. Finally, the introduction of the author’s second husband, painter Augustus Wall Callcott, brings about one of the several clashes between private and public voice that can be found in her work. Privately, she had confided in a letter to Empress Leopoldine of Brazil that she was weary of being alone and therefore had ‘consented’ to remarry. Interestingly, in that letter she describes her future husband as ‘the man I have chosen’, again as in the relation of her engagement to Thomas Graham, assuming the active, traditionally masculine role. Could she also have been implying that there was a number of suitors to choose from? Nevertheless, in the ‘Introduction’ to her unpublished German journal of 1828, she places herself in a secondary position regarding her artist husband and even acts as a mouthpiece for his views on art, as I show in chapter 10.