Mary MacLane (May 1 1881 — August 1929) was a controversial Canadian-born American writer whose frank memoirs helped usher in the confessional style of autobiographical writing. MacLane was known as the "Wild Woman of Butte".

MacLane was a very popular author for her time, scandalizing the populace with her shocking bestselling first memoir and to a lesser extent her two following books. She was considered wild and uncontrolled, a reputation she nurtured, and was openly bisexual as well as a vocal feminist. In her writings, she compared herself to another frank young memoirist, Marie Bashkirtseff, who died a few years after MacLane was born,and H. L. Mencken called her, "the Butte Bashkirtseff."

Early life and popularity

MacLane was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada in 1881, but her family moved to the Red River area of Minnesota, settling in Fergus Falls, which her father helped develop. After her father's death in 1889, her mother remarried a family friend and lawyer, H. Gysbert Klenze, and soon after the family moved to Montana, first settling in Great Falls and finally in Butte, where Klenze drained the family fund pursuing mining and other ventures. She spent the remainder of her life in the United States. MacLane 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 pilloried by conservative critics and readers, and lightly ridiculed by H. L. Mencken. Rather than embodied she had always chafed, or felt, "anxiety of place," at living in Butte, which was a mining town far off from the centers of culture, and used the money from her first book's sales of this book to travel to Chicago, then Massachusetts, settling for a time in Rockland, Massachusetts from 1903-1908 and then in Greenwich Village from 1908-1909, where she continued writing and, by her own account, living a decadent and Bohemian existence. She was close friends with feminist writer Inez Haynes Irwin, who is mentioned in MacLane's private correspondence and appears in some of MacLane's 1910 newspaper writing in a Butte paper.

Some critics have suggested that 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.

In 1917 she wrote and starred in an autobiographical silent film titled Men Who Have Made Love to Me - now believed to be lost to time.

MacLane died in Chicago sometime in early August 1929, aged 48. She was soon forgotten and her body of prose remained out of print until late 1993, when The Story of Mary MacLane and some of her newspaper feature work 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 and Filmography

• Men Who Have Made Love to Me (1917)

Further reading

• Caryolyn J. Mattern, "Mary MacLane: A Feminist Opinion", Montana The Magazine of Western History, 27 (Autumn 1977), 54-63.
• Barbara Miller, "'Hot as Live Embers--Cold as Hail': The Restless Soul of Butte's Mary MacLane", Montana Magazine, September 1982, 50-53.
• Virginia Terris, "Mary MacLane--Realist", The Speculator, Summer 1985, 42-49.
• Leslie A. Wheeler, "Montana's Shocking 'Lit'ry Lady'", Montana The Magazine of Western History, 27 (Summer 1977), 20-33.

Notes

1. The Chicagoan, obituary editorial, August 1929. Quoted in Tender Darkness, Introduction.
2. Watson, Julia Dr. (2002). "Introduction", The Story of Mary MacLane. ISBN 1-931832-19-6.
3. New York Times obituary article, 9 August 1929
4. Story of Mary MacLane (1902 and 1911), first entry.
5. Story of Mary MacLane (1902 and 1911), first entry.
6. Tender Darkness, bibliography
7. Tender Darkness, introduction
8. Unpublished personal letters in collection of Tender Darkness publisher - to be published in forthcoming anthology

External links

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