Mary MacLane
Mary MacLane
Mary MacLanewas a controversial Canadian-born American writer whose frank memoirs helped usher in the confessional style of autobiographical writing. MacLane was known as the "Wild Woman of Butte"...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionWriter
CountryCanada
love pure utterly woman
Are there many things in this cool-hearted world so utterly exquisiteas the pure love of one woman for another?
bored civilization interested looks man mention scorn
One kind of man I impatiently scorn is the kind that looks bored if I mention Ibsen or ceramics or Aztec civilization but is interested instantly, alertly, if I mention my garters
book canadian-writer joy longer wrote
The only joy I had was writing what was. That book was. It no longer amuses me to be all the things I was when I wrote that. But it is my story as I was then.
analysis canadian-writer diary life months portrayal soul though three written wrote
The book, you understand, was not written for publication. It was the portrayal of my emotions, the analysis of my own soul life during three months of my nineteenth year. I wrote then all the time, just as I do now, but, though the book is in diary form, it is not a diary.
people peculiar emphasis
People say of me, 'She's peculiar.' They do not understand me. If they did they would say so oftener and with emphasis.
taken years three
When I was three years old I was taken with my family to a little town in Western Minnesota, where I lived a more or less vapid and ordinary life until I was ten.
strong-women taken heart
Genius of a kind has always been with me; an empty heart that has taken on a certain wooden quality; an excellent, strong woman's body and a pitiably starved soul.
girl pain book
It is with pain that I read of the dire effects of my book upon the minds of young girls.
strong real self
I never give my real self. I have a hundred sides, and I turn first one way and then the other. I am playing a deep game. I have a number of strong cards up my sleeve. I have never been myself, excepting to two friends.
girl clever heart
You may think me crude, and probably I am crude, but I am not so crude as I was, for I am clever enough to see that the girl of nineteen who thought herself a genius was only an unusual girl writing her heart out.
play adore i-like-him
I do not sing nor play, but I adore music, particularly Chopin. I like him because I cannot understand him.
lines walt
I have never read a line of Walt Whitman.
girl reading book
I read of the Kalamazoo girl who killed herself after reading the book. I am not at all surprised. She lived in Kalamazoo, for one thing, and then she read the book.
want fame i-can
I want fame more than I can tell. But more than I want fame I want happiness.