Maxwell Gray

Mary Gleed Tuttiett (11 December 1846 – 21 September 1923), better known by the pen name Maxwell Gray, was an English novelist and poet best known for her 1886 novel The Silence of Dean Maitland.

Life

Tuttiett was born and brought up in Newport, Isle of Wight, the daughter of the surgeon Frank Bampfylde Tuttiett and his wife Elizabeth née Gleed.

Although largely self-educated, she attended Queen's College, London to train to be a governess. In early adulthood she visited London, various other parts of England, and Yverdon-les-Bains in Switzerland; but for the majority of her working life as a writer had constant debilitating illness from asthma and rheumatism—reports described her as "a confirmed invalid"—that left her unable to leave her bed for more than two to three hours a day. She wrote lying on a sofa.

For much of her life she lived and worked confined to her home in Newport, first at Pyle Street (where works up to The Last Sentence were written) then at Castle Road, only making occasional trips out by carriage or bath-chair. On one such trip she visited the American writer Wolcott Balestier, whose sister married Rudyard Kipling, when he and his family were staying at Blackgang. Her 1893 novel The Last Sentence was dedicated to Balestier after his early death.

She was strongly interested in women's rights, being one of a number of writers who petitioned in support of the Women's Suffrage Bill, and such themes appear in a number of her novels.

After her father's death in 1895, she moved to West Richmond, remaining in London until her death in 1923, aged 76, at Ealing. In 2023 the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography included her, Mrs. Disney Leith, Jean Middlemass, Florence L. Barclay, Gabrielle Wodnil and Bessie Marchant in new biographies of eleven Victorian writers who have caught the attention of academics.