Margaret Wade Campbell Deland

Margaret Deland (born Margaretta Wade Campbell; February 23, 1857 – January 13, 1945) was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet. She also wrote an autobiography in two volumes. She generally is considered part of the literary realism movement.

Biography

Margaretta Wade Campbell was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania (today a part of Pittsburgh) on February 23, 1857. Her mother died due to complications from the birth, and she was left in the care of an aunt named Lois Wade and her husband Benjamin Campbell Blake.

On May 12, 1880, she married Lorin F. Deland. Her husband had inherited his father's publishing company, which he sold in 1886 and worked in advertising. It was at this period she began to write, first writing verses for her husband's greeting-card business. Her first poem was published in the March 1885 issue of Harper's New Monthly Magazine and her first poetry collection, titled The Old Garden and Other Verses, was published in late 1886 by Houghton Mifflin. Her novel John Ward, Preacher, her first, was published in 1888.

Deland and her husband moved to Boston, Massachusetts and, over a four-year span, they took in and supported unmarried mothers at their residence at 76 Mount Vernon Street on Beacon Hill. They also maintained the summer home Greywood, overlooking the Kennebunk River in Kennebunkport, Maine. It was in this home that Canadian actress Margaret Anglin visited in 1909, and the two women reviewed Deland's manuscript for The Awakening of Helena Richie. Anglin reported "I never spent a pleasanter time than I did while Mrs. Deland and I chugged up and down the little Kennbunkport [sic] River in a boat, talking over the future of Helena Richie." The Delands kept their summer home in Maine for about 50 years.