Marion harland biography

Harland was born Mary Virginia Hawes in Dennisville, Virginia, in Amelia County, in 1830 and spent her early years in rural areas before moving to Richmond when she was in her early teens.

She married Edward Payson Terhune in 1856 and moved to Newark, New Jersey, in 1859, when her husband, a Presbyterian minister, was given a pastorate there. She spent most of the rest of her life in the North, and died in New York in 1922.

Harland began to write as a child, and at age fifteen, using a male pseudonym, she submitted stories to The Watchman and Observer, a religious magazine published in Richmond.

Marion harland biography

She sent other stories to different magazines, eventually choosing the name “Marion Harland,” under which she wrote for the rest of her life. Her first novel, Alone (1854), was privately published when she was twenty-four; the book was instantly popular.

She went on to publish more than seventy-five volumes, and her short stories were published in some of the leading magazin