Mary Jane Windle (born February 16, 1825) was an American short-story writer and journalist.
Mary Jane Windle | |
|---|---|
| Born | February 16, 1825  Wilmington |
| Died | after 1882 |
| Occupation | Writer |
Life and career
editMary Jane Windle was born on February 16, 1825 in Wilmington, Delaware.[1]
Windle published two collections of her short stories of historical fiction, Truth and Fancy (1850) and Legend of the Waldenses, and Other Tales (1852). Zohara Boyd writes that Windle's is "irritating and boring" and wildly historically inaccurate.[2]
Windle worked in Washington DC as a society columnist. Her observations of Washington society and Congressional proceedings were praised at the time. Windle's sympathies were unabashedly anti-Northern.[3][4] Boyd writes: "In Windle's sketches, Southern delegates, cabinet members, and judges are all uniformly handsome, learned, and eloquent; Northerners are all cold, haughty, and wrongheaded. Southern women, of course, are prettier, more elegant, and more sweet-tempered."[2]
Windle was arrested under suspicion for being a Confederate spy.[5] She was apprehended on August 22, 1861, leaving Alexandria, Virginia. Mary Chestnut wrote in her diary that Windle was "boldy proclaiming herself a secessionist & saying she is in correspondence with Confederate leaders."[6] At the end of the war, she was arrested again, one of a number of people in the capitol arrested for seditious outbursts following President Lincoln's assassination,. In Reveille in Washington, Margaret Leech writes "Windle was accused of maliciously tearing down flags from her boardinghouse, and throwing them into the street"[7]
At some point, for unknown reasons, she began going by the name Mary Jane McLane and was even crossing out references to Mary Jane Windle she found at the Library of Congress and replacing them with Mary Jane McLane.[8]
In 1882, she was living in an attic in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in poverty after loaning most of her money to a relative who died without repaying her. The Philadelphia Times described her: "Sometimes she carries in her hand a huge umbrella; sometimes an immense handkerchief grasped by one corner and floating about her like a flag, and occasionally she displays in her cotton gloved hands a huge slice of bread and butter as she walks."[9]
Works
edit- Truth and Fancy (1850)
- Legend of the Waldenses, and Other Tales (1852)
- Life at White Sulphur Springs, or Pictures of a Pleasant Summer (1857)
- Life in Washington and Life Here and There (1859)
References
edit- ^ Hart, John Seely (1852). The female prose writers of America. The Library of Congress. Philadelphia, E. H. Butler & co.
- ^ a b Boyd, Zohara (2000). "WINDLE, Mary Jane". American women writers : a critical reference guide : from colonial times to the present. Taryn Benbow-Pfalzgraf (2nd ed.). Detroit: St. James Press. ISBN 1-55862-429-5. OCLC 42027536.
- ^ The North Carolina Historical Review 1954-07: Vol 31 Iss 3. North Carolina Division of Archives and. July 1954.
- ^ Thomas A. Chambers (2002). Drinking the waters. Smithsonian Institution Press. ISBN 978-1-58834-068-9.
- ^ Ishbel_ross (1936). Ladies Of The Press.
- ^ Chesnut, Mary Boykin; Woodward, C. Vann (Comer Vann); Muhlenfeld, Elisabeth (1984). The private Mary Chesnut : the unpublished Civil War diaries. New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 144. ISBN 978-0-19-503513-1.
- ^ Margaret Leech. Reveille In Washington 1860–1865.
- ^ Clark, Allen C. (Allen Culling) (1920). Joseph Gales, junior, editor and mayor. The Library of Congress. Washington.
- ^ "Latter Day Lot of Mary Jane Windle, Famous as an Authoress Some Years Ago". Harrisburg Daily Independent. 23 Nov 1882.