Born: 21 December 1830, United States
Died: 3 June 1922
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Mary Virginia Hawes, Marion Herland, Mrs. E. P. Terhune
The following is shared from the Encyclopedia Virginia, in line with the Creative Commons licensing.
Marion Harland was a writer of novels, short stories, biographies, travel narratives, cookbooks, and domestic manuals whose career stretched across seven decades of sectional conflict and great change in American life. Harland chronicled much of that change, penning novels that suggested her own divided loyalties between North and South before establishing herself as an expert and often a sly and sarcastic commentator on the domestic arts of homemaking.
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. 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 magazines of her day, earning her an award for her writing as early as 1853. She wrote a syndicated newspaper column for women for more than eighteen years, and edited several publications for short periods. Harland’s last novel, The Carringtons of High Hill, was published in 1919, when she was eighty-eight.
Harland’s novels were written over the course of more than sixty-five years, including the turbulent period before, during, and after the American Civil War (1861–1865). As a native Southerner who followed her husband to live in the North, Harland’s loyalties were sorely divided during the war, though she emphatically disapproved of secession. These inner conflicts were often expressed in her fiction. Her earlier novels portrayed Virginia as an idyllic place, and its inhabitants as paragons of virtue and conduct, coexisting peacefully in a near utopia. A later novel, Sunnybank (1866), describes the many privations and dangers of wartime Virginia, and begins to explore the conflicts in Southern society at that time. In some of her later novels, which are set in the North, she continued to focus on providing good moral lessons through her fiction.
During Harland’s first months in Newark, struggling for the first time with household tasks such as cooking and cleaning, she realized there was a serious need for detailed, practical manuals for maintaining a household. Her response to that need, published in 1871, was Common Sense in the Household: A Manual of Practical Housewifery. Described by one author as “enlivened with pungent commentary,” the book sold more than a million copies and was kept in print for the next fifty years. Through this book and others of its kind that followed, Marion Harland became a household name.
Her works on cooking, housekeeping, and etiquette all celebrate “the talent of home-making, precious and incommunicable,” as she described it in The Secret of a Happy Home (1896). Though Harland made it clear that women were duty-bound to keep a well-ordered home, she also recognized and lamented the limitations placed on women. “It must be a fine thing,” she wrote, “to be a man on some accounts;—to be emancipated forever-and-a-day from the thralldom of skirts for instance, and to push through a crowd to read the interjectional headlines upon a bulletin board, instead of going meekly and unenlightened home.” In the face of these challenges, however, Harland urged her readers to develop their other talents and their intellects.
Eminently practical, witty, sarcastic, encouraging and kind, Harland’s manuals were a boon to women throughout the country. Common Sense, for instance, includes instructions for common household problems, such as removing stains or making a wound stop bleeding (“cobwebs and brown sugar, pressed on like lint”), as well as scores of recipes.
Some of Harland’s other works include books based on extensive travel in Europe and the Middle East, biographies of Mary Washington and British novelist Charlotte Brontë, and histories of colonial America. She also collaborated on various writing projects with each of her three surviving children, including her son, Albert Payson Terhune, best known as the author of Lad: A Dog (1957), and other works.
Major Works
Alone (1854)
The Hidden Path (1855)
Moss Side (1857)
Miriam (1862)
Husbands and Homes (1865)
Sunnybank (1866)
Common Sense in the Household: A Manual of Practical Housewifery (1871)
True as Steel (1872)
Breakfast, Luncheon, and Tea (1875)
The Dinner Year-Book (1878)
Loiterings in Pleasant Paths (1880)
Handicapped (1881)
Eve’s Daughters; or, Common Sense for Maid Wife and Mother (1882)
The Cottage Kitchen: A Collection of Practical and Inexpensive Receipts (1883)
Judith: A Chronicle of Old Virginia (1883)
Common Sense in the Nursery (1885)
With the Best Intentions: A Midsummer Episode (1890)
The Story of Mary Washington (1892)
The Royal Road; or, Taking Him at His Word (1894)
The Secret of a Happy Home (1896)
The National Cook Book (with Christine Terhune Herrick, 1896)
An Old-Field School-Girl (1897)
Some Colonial Homesteads and Their Stories (1897)
Where Ghosts Walk: The Haunts of Familiar Characters in History and Literature (1898)
Charlotte Brontë at Home (1899)
Marion Harland’s Complete Cookbook: A Practical and Exhaustive Manual of Cookery and Housekeeping (1903)
Everyday Etiquette: A Practical Manual of Social Usages (with Virginia Terhune Van de Water, 1905)
The Distractions of Martha (1906)
The Housekeeper’s Week (1908)
Marion Harland’s Autobiography: The Story of a Long Life (1910)
The Helping Hand Cook Book: With A Menu for Every Day in the Year, Together with Numerous Recipes (with Christine Terhune Herrick, 1912)
Looking Westward (1914)
The Carringtons of High Hill (1919)
TIMELINE
1830: Marion Harland is born Mary Virginia Hawes in Dennisville.
1854: Marion Harland’s first novel, Alone, is privately published and achieves immediate success.
1856: Marion Harland marries Edward Payson Terhune, a Presbyterian minister.
1859: Marion Harland moves to Newark, New Jersey, when her husband is given a pastorate.
1871: Marion Harland publishes Common Sense in the Household: A Manual of Practical Housewifery, her response to a need for literature offering detailed tips on maintaining a household as a young wife. The book sells more than a million copies and is kept in print for the next fifty years.
1919: Marion Harland’s last novel, The Carringtons of High Hill, is published. She is eighty-eight.
The following is republished from New Jersey Women’s History, in line with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Writer and homemaker Mary Virginia Hawes Terhune (1830-1922) began her first novel at the age of sixteen.
It was published by her father in 1854 after it was rejected by a formal publisher. Her novel Alone was an immediate success, and when republished two years later it sold more than 100,000 copies.
Terhune’s minister husband Edward Payson Terhune was called to preach in Newark where the couple remained for the next eighteen years. She continued writing despite her home, parish, and civic responsibilities. Terhune served as the President of the Women’s Christian Association of Newark for which she raised money, counseled, and found jobs for poor young women.
A prolific writer, Terhune published fourteen novels between 1857 and 1873. Among her published works was a book entitled Common Sense in the Household. The instructional guide was written in 1871 for the beginner homemaker and launched Terhune’s name to the best-seller list. Her book was translated into French, Spanish, German, and Arabic. Terhune’s success in the homemaker industry encouraged her to publish numerous articles, syndicated columns, and lectures related to household themes. She still believed that women found their highest fulfillment as wives and mothers, but also suggested that these roles should not overshadow active involvement in other positions of power.
References:
Fahs, Alice. “The Woman’s Page.” In Out on Assignment: Newspaper Women and the Making of Modern Public Space, 56-91. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2011.
Hawkesworth, Mary, Lisa Hetfield, Barbara Balliet and Jennifer Morgan. “Femnist Interventions: Creating New Institutional Spaces for Women at Rutgers.” In Doing Diversity in Higher Education: Faculty Leaders Share Challenges and Strategies, edited by Winnifred R. Brown-Glaude. Piscataway: Rutgers University Press, 2008, 137-165. Accessed April 26, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central.
The following is excerpted from Famous Women: An Outline of Feminine Achievement Through the Ages With Life Stories of Five Hundred Noted Women. Written by Joseph Adelman, published 1926 by Ellis M Lonow Company.
Marian Harland, the pen name of Mrs. E. P. Terhune, an American novelist and journalist, born in Richmond, Va., of New England ancestry.
She was editorially connected with Babyhood, Wide Awake, Saint Nicholas, and the Home-Maker, and during her long career, she wrote many popular domestic manuals, social essays, sketches of travel, novels and short stories.
Her works include: Alone, A Tale of Southern Life and Manners (1854), Common Sense in the Household (1872) and Marion Harland’s Autobiography (1910).
The following is excerpted from Woman: Her Position, Influence and Achievement Throughout the Civilized World. Designed and Arranged by William C. King. Published in 1900 by The King-Richardson Co. Copyright 1903 The King-Richardson Co.
Mrs. Mary Virginia Terhune, “Marian Harland”, Celebrated Writer on Domestic Economy, 1830 – 1922 A.D.
Her pen name is a household word in our land. Intimate friends tell us how charmingly she has combined “home making” with literary work. She possesses a masterful way of making duties fit each other without fuss or jostle.
Who can say how many hundred homes have been brightened and sweetened and made more wholesome in everything from food to atmosphere by her wise and happy writings?
Miss Mary Virginia Hawes was born in Virginia, though her parents were natives of New England.
Her education was of the best; and while pursuing her studies she showed marked ability. At fourteen years of age she began to contribute to a weekly paper in Richmond. At sixteen she wrote Marrying Through Prudential Motives, which was so popular as to be published in England and translated into French and finally retranslated into English and again published. Finally, it reappeared in the United States in its altered form.
She became the wife of Rev. Edward Payson Terhune, who has for many years been the pastor of the Puritan Congregational Church of Brooklyn N.Y.
Mrs. Terhune’s writing has not all been along the same lines, but she has written several novels; among them, Alone, a tale of Southern life and manners, The Hidden Path, True as Steel.
Husbands and Homes; Common Sense in the Household; Breakfast, Luncheon, and Tea; The Dinner Year Book; Eve’s Daughters, or Common Sense for Maid, Wife, and Mother, are books whose titles speak for themselves.
She is widely known as a lecturer before Women’s councils on “The Kitchen as a Moral Agency,” “Our sons and Our Daughters,” and “How to Grow Old Gracefully.”