About Margaret Deland
Margaret Deland, born Margaretta Wade Campbell (February 23, 1857 in Allegheny, Pennsylvania - died on January 13, 1945 in Boston, Massachusetts), was an American poet, novelist and short story writer. She depicted life in small towns and is generally considered part of the literary realism movement. Her first poem, The Succory, was published in the March 1885 issue of Harper's Monthly Magazine. Her first collection of poems, The Old Garden and Other Verses, was published in late 1886 by Houghton Mifflin but it was her first novel, John Ward, Preacher, published in 1888, that made her famous: a book which arouses controversy and becomes a bestseller. It describes the moral incompatibility, despite their feelings for each other, of an Episcopalian woman married to a Calvinist man. In her later writings, she deals repeatedly with the ethical and moral conflicts and dilemmas of a society living under the pressure of preachers and theologians. Deland is recognized as an important and popular author of literary realism.In 1926, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters along with Edith Wharton, Agnes Replier, and Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman. Deland was also a member of an informal women's club that included Amy Beach, Alice Howe Gibbens (wife of William James), and Ida Agassiz (wife of Henry Lee Higginson). By 1941, Deland had published 33 books. She died in Boston of heart disease on January 13, 1945, at the Sheraton Hotel. She is buried in Forest Hills Cemetery. Her home on Mount Vernon Street, Beacon Hill, is a stop on the Boston Women's Heritage Trail.
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Books are like sapphires; they must be polished – polished! or else you insult your readers
