Mary MacLane, the Wild Woman from Butte – The Public Domain Review

After the furore surrounding her debut, MacLane published a second book the following year. Expecting more in the same vein, readers were stunned upon opening My friend Annabel Lee (1903) – a proto-surrealist account of the narrator’s friendship with a Japanese porcelain doll named after Edgar Allan Poe’s poem. Critics, if they said anything at all, often dismissed the attempt in one sentence. “The book is boring and silly, and apparently written to show that anything that calls itself a book will find buyers.” From here, MacLane’s biography becomes spotty, a swirl of journalistic gossip, personal silence and conflicting scientific accounts. She longed for home, ‘where people are so much more virile and full of imagination’. She cycled through lanes – spells at the Denver Post, Boston AmericanAnd New York Evening Paper – and worked for a while as a boxing reporter. She squandered her fortune and was arrested for outstanding debts. For many years she lived with Caroline M. Branson. Forty-four years her senior, Branson was the former long-term partner of Maria Louise Pool, a writer whom MacLane admired. They spent winters in Rockland, Massachusetts, and summers in St. Augustine, Florida, where MacLane liked to gamble: “I almost always win.” She continued to write adoring letters to Monroe: “I hope I can see you one day, before the wandering and wonderful youth has touched us for the last time and fled away.” Wherever she traveled, writes Penelope Rosement, “she freely expressed her controversial views on marriage, the family, sex, religion, literature, morality, the idiocy of the rich, and anything else that came to her mind.”