Maria J. McIntosh

Maria Jane McIntosh (1803 – February 25, 1878) was an American novelist, children's writer, and essayist. She began her literary career under the pseudonym Aunt Kitty, publishing a series of moralistic children's stories before turning to novels in the 1840s.

McIntosh's writings addressed morality, gender roles, and contemporary social issues. In Woman in America: Her Work and Her Reward (1850), she opposed the emerging women's rights movement and advocated for women's moral influence within the domestic sphere. McIntosh also wrote about contemporary political issues. She defended slavery in both fiction and nonfiction. Her novel The Lofty and the Lowly, written in response to the antislavery literature of the period, presented a sympathetic depiction of the plantations in the South.

Early life and education

McIntosh was born in 1803 in Sunbury, Georgia, to Lachlan and Mary Moore Maxwell McIntosh. Lachlan McIntosh was a major in the American Revolutionary War and afterwards established a law practice in Sunbury. When McIntosh was three, her father died. She was educated at home by her mother and later attended the coeducational Sunbury Academy. In 1820, she studied at Baiden's Bluff Academy.

After her mother's death in 1823, McIntosh managed the family's plantation until it was sold in 1835. She moved to New York City to live with her half-brother, James MacKay McIntosh, and invested the proceeds from the sale of the estate in New York securities. Two years later, she lost her savings in the Panic of 1837. To support herself, she began writing under the pen name Aunt Kitty.