Mary MacLane, the Wild Woman from Butte

Summary

Off the back of the uproar surrounding her debut, MacLane published a second book the following year. Expecting more in the same vein, readers were stumped upon opening My Friend Annabel Lee (1903) — a proto-surrealist account of the narrator’s friendship with a Japanese porcelain doll named after the Edgar Allan Poe poem. Critics, if they spoke at all, often dismissed the effort in a single line. “The book is dull and silly, and apparently written to demonstrate that anything calling itself a book will find buyers.” From here, MacLane’s biography gets spotty, a swirl of journalistic gossip, personal silence, and conflicting scholarly accounts. She longed for home, “where people are so much more virile and full of imagination”. She cycled through jobs — spells at the Denver Post, Boston American, and New York Evening Journal — and worked, for a time, as a boxing reporter. She squandered her fortune and was arrested for outstanding debts. For many years, she lived with Caroline M. Branson. Forty-four years her senior, Branson was the former long-term partner of Maria Louise Pool, a writer whom MacLane admired. They spent winters in Rockland, Massachusetts, and summered in St. Augustine, Florida, where MacLane loved to gamble: “I nearly always win”. She continued to write Monroe adoring letters: “I hope I can see you some day and before errant and wondrous youth has touched us for the last time and fled away.” Wherever she traveled, writes Penelope Rosement, “she freely expounded her controversial views on marriage, the family, sex, religion, literature, morality, the idiocy of the rich, and anything else that came to mind.”