Mary Andrews Denison
Mary Andrews Denison was an American novelist. She wrote over eighty novels which in total sold more than one million copies. Her writing style was typical of the dime novels popular in the mid-nineteenth century, featuring sweet-natured and noble heroines who triumph over evil.
Biography
Mary Ann Andrews was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts on May 26, 1826. Her family moved to Boston when she was a child, where she attended private and public schools.In 1846, she married Charles Wheeler Denison, becoming stepmother to his daughter and two sons. Charles Denison was a clergyman and the founding editor of the first anti-slavery newspaper in New York, The Emancipator. He was also assistant editor of the Boston newspaper Olive Branch, and after meeting Charles, Mary began writing stories and sketches for that and other periodicals. She wrote her first book, Edna Etheril, the Boston Seamstress in 1847.
In 1853, she followed her husband to British Guiana where he had been appointed consul general. They moved multiple times in the 1850s and 1860s, living in Buffalo, London, and finally settling in Washington, D.C. in 1867. In the late 1850s, she served as editor of the Lady's Enterprise while continuing to write for periodicals such as Gleason's Literary Companion and Frank Leslie's Popular Monthly. During the Civil War, Charles served as a chaplain in Washington, D.C., and Mary nursed the ill and dying.
After her husband's death in 1881, Mary continued writing. In the early 1900s, she moved to Baltimore. During the last fourteen months of her life, she lived in her brother's home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Denison died of pneumonia in Cambridge on October 15, 1911, and was buried in Lakeside Cemetery in Wakefield, Massachusetts.