Mary MacLane (May 1, 1881 - August 1929) was a controversial writer during the Edwardian period. She was quite popular in her time, writing best sellers that shocked the sexually repressed sensibilities of the existing society. Considered to be wild and uncontrolled, she was bisexual and held very vocal feminist opinions.

She was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, but her family moved to Butte, Montana when she was four, and she spent the remainder of her life in the United States.

She began writing published material for her school paper in 1898. From the beginning, her writing was characterized by a direct, fiery, and highly individualistic style.

At the age of 19 in 1902, MacLane published her first book, The Story of Mary MacLane. It sold 100,000 copies in the first month and was popular among young girls, but was strongly criticized by conservative readers.

She used the money from sales of this book to move from Butte, Montana to Greenwich Village where she continued to write books and newspaper articles.

Even by today's standards, MacLane's writing is raw, honest, unflinching, self-aware, sensual, and extreme. She wrote openly about egoism and her own self-love, about sexual attraction and love for other women, and even about her desire to marry the Devil.

Later, she wrote an autobiographical silent film titled Men Who Have Made Love to Me; the film itself is now lost.

Mary MacLane died in Chicago sometime in early August, 1929. She quickly became forgotten and remained out of print until 1993, when The Story of Mary MacLane was republished in an anthology titled Tender Darkness.

Bibliography

Books

• The Story of Mary MacLane (1902)
• My Friend, Annabel Lee (1903)
• I, Mary MacLane: A Diary of Human Days (1917)
• Tender Darkness (reprint anthology) (1993)
• The Story of Mary MacLane and Other Writings (reprint anthology) (1999)

Selected articles

• Consider Thy Youth and Therein (1899)
• Mary MacLane at Newport (1902)
• On Marriage (1902)
• Mary MacLane Soliloquizes on Scarlet Fever (1910)
• Mary MacLane Meets the Vampire on the Isle of Treacherous Delights (1910)
• Mary MacLane Wants a Vote - For the Other Woman (1910)
• Woman and the Cigarette (1911)
• Mary MacLane on Marriage (1917)

Screenplays

• Men Who Have Made Love to Me (1917)

External Links

• Introduction to Tender Darkness: A Mary MacLane Anthology - by Elisabeth Pruitt
• marymaclane.com - Website maintained by the co-publisher of Tender Darkness, Michael Brown
• Hot Love, Sexual radicals bookend the century - by Carol Lynn Mithers