Mary Agnes Tincker

Mary Agnes Tincker (July 18, 1833 – December 4, 1907) was an American novelist. She published about a dozen novels and many short stories. She was made a member of the Ancient Academy of Arcadia of Rome, and of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Philadelphia.

Life and works

Tincker was born in Ellsworth, Maine, daughter of Richard Tinker and Mehitable Jellison; descendant of Thomas Tinker, of the Mayflower, and of Benjamin Jellison, a Presbyterian, of Scots, Irish and English extraction, who was an extensive land-owner in Maine and Canada, but, having adhered to the Loyalist cause during the revolution, his estate was confiscated. He then settled on a grant of land in New Brunswick, where he began life anew. Mary Tincker's father was deputy sheriff and subsequently high sheriff of Hancock County, and at the time of his death was warden of the Maine state prison. She was educated at the high-school in Ellsworth, and at the academy in Blue Hill, Maine. At the age of thirteen she began teaching in the public schools. At fifteen her first literary work was printed. Her father was a prosperous Congregational farmer but his daughter was so shocked by an incident in which a Roman Catholic priest was tarred-and-feathered by a mob of Know-Nothing agitators, that she converted to Roman Catholicism in protest at the age of twenty.

Civil War

In 1863, she procured a recommendation from Governor John A. Andrew of Massachusetts as a volunteer nurse for the wounded of the Civil War, and served in ward 6, Judiciary Square Hospital, at Washington, D. C., until she herself fell ill. On her recovery, making her residence in Boston, she was there wholly engrossed in journalistic and literary work. Short stories from her pen appeared in the early numbers of The Catholic World. During this period she wrote her earliest novels, "The House of Yorke" and " Grapes and Thorns," both of which were in the fourth edition in 1872, and "A Winged World, and other Sketches" (1873).