Mary Johnston (1870–1936)

Early Life

Title: To Have and To
Hold (title page)
Source: Documenting the American South
More informationMary Johnston was born on November 21, 1870, in Buchanan, Boutetourt County. Her father, John William Johnston, was a lawyer, cousin of Confederate general Joseph E. Johnston and a Confederate veteran of the American Civil War (1861–1865). "We lived in a veritable battle cloud," Mary Johnston wrote about her childhood, "an atmosphere of war stories, of continued reference to the men and to the deeds of that gigantic struggle." She described herself as "shy and awkward, easily wounded and then too proud to show that I was wounded." Due to frequent illnesses, Johnston spent much of her childhood alone, reading Shakespeare, the popular adventures of Sir Walter Scott, and the socially conscious novels of Charles Dickens, as well as English poets and historians and "an infinite variety of odds and ends."

When Johnston was sixteen, she and her family moved to Birmingham, Alabama, and for three months the following year she attended boarding school in Atlanta, Georgia; this was her only formal education. Johnston's life changed dramatically when, in 1889, her mother died. The oldest of six children but still a teenager, Johnston took charge of the household. Apart from caring for her younger siblings, she became her father's emotional support and accompanied him on numerous business trips both across the United States and abroad.

In 1892, when the family moved to New York, Johnston was hobbled by illness. This, coupled with the economic panic from 1893 until 1897, motivated her to seek extra income through writing. Keeping her efforts a secret from her family, Johnston submitted various short stories for publication and burned the rejection notices. She also began her first novel, doing her writing in Central Park. About 1902, the family moved to Richmond, and Johnston lived in Virginia for the rest of her life. Her father died on May 21, 1905, after which her family depended heavily on her earnings as a novelist.

Writing and Politics

Title: "Thou Art Her
Murderer!" from To Have
and To Hold
Source: Documenting the American South
More informationJohnston wrote constantly. Between 1898 and 1936, she published twenty-three novels; one volume of Virginia history; one play, titled The Goddess of Reason (1907); and numerous short stories. To Have and to Hold was serialized in the Atlantic Monthly in 1899 and published in novel form the following year. It was her first big success, and the publication of her subsequent historical romances were major literary events. In 1908, Johnston began the research required for her Civil War novels, The Long Roll (1911) and Cease Firing (1912), both of which were also huge commercial successes. She retained the respect of many critics despite a gradual loss in popularity as she began to write on metaphysical issues and societal problems, straying from the lighter fare of her historical romances. Her literary legacy is complex and must take into an a writer of history, sentimental romance, realistic fiction, advocacy fiction (Hagar, 1913), and experimental fiction (Sweet Rocket, 1920).

In addition to her literary career, Johnston was involved in numerous social causes. She advocated sex education and informing women about birth control and venereal disease, legislation protecting labor, raising public health standards, and enacting laws addressing child neglect and juvenile delinquency. During World War I (1914–1918), she remained a pacifist and considered herself a socialist. She became critical of organized religion and, to her family's dismay, withdrew her membership from the Baptist Church and turned instead to spiritualism and Theosophy (beliefs that suggest all religions contain at least some truth that contributes to humanity's eventual perfection). Johnston was a member of the Author's League, the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the American Association for Labor Legislation, the Woman's Trade Union League, the Consumer's League, and the Forestry Association of America.

Johnston and Suffrage

Title: Glasgow, Ellen (with
inscription)
Source: Special Collections and
Archives, James Branch Cabell
Library, Virginia Commonwealth
University
More informationThe cause Johnston supported most actively and vocally was woman suffrage. In 1909, she joined the newly formed Equal Suffrage League of Virginia along with several of her prominent friends, including Ellen Glasgow and Lila Meade Valentine. Johnston served as honorary vice president. She also became honorary vice president of the Southern States Woman Suffrage Conference, an organization she later resigned from because of what she considered to be its overtly racist rhetoric.

Despite her initial shyness about public speaking, Johnston became one of the most popular speakers of the movement. She wrote numerous articles and pamphlets in support of suffrage, as well as her novel and feminist manifesto, Hagar. Although Johnston preferred using more conservative methods for winning the vote, she respected radicals like Alice Paul, who engaged in civil disobedience and staged hunger strikes. On at least one occasion, Johnston served as mediator at a "peace conference" between the Congressional Union and the National American Woman Suffrage Association.

After ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1920, Johnston declined an invitation to serve on the Organizing Committee of the League of Women Voters. She stated that she supported the extension of suffrage leagues in newly enfranchised states for informative purposes only and was "against any re-segregation of women in the political and social life of the country."

Johnston and Lynching

Title: Mary Johnston, Seated
Source: the Library of Congress Prints
and Photographs Division,
[LC-B2–700–7]
More informationIn addition to her passion for the suffrage movement, Johnston abhorred lynching. In May 1923, her short story "Nemesis," published in Century magazine, depicted the lynching of a black man in a small southern town, dramatizing the events following the murder, as well as its psychological impact on those involved. The story generated a grateful response from the African American community. Walter White, assistant secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), wrote Johnston to say that he had never "read any story on this great national disgrace of ours which moved me as yours did." "Nemesis" also suggested that Johnston was, in some respects, ahead of her time. The story appeared nearly seven years before Jesse Daniel Ames founded the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching. Ames, a Texas suffragist, is often credited as being one of the first white southern women to speak out against lynching.

Still, Johnston did not always seek the role of activist. In fact, she rarely if ever spoke publicly against lynching and even declined a request to have the story read into the Congressional Record. Although passionate about many issues, she nevertheless tended to restrict her views to her correspondence and, occasionally, her fiction. The exception, of course, was suffrage, and some evidence suggests that Johnston was repulsed by various attacks she sustained as a suffrage activist, possibly making her hesitant to speak out again.

In 1912, Johnston constructed a new house, called Three Hills, tucked among the Blue Ridge Mountains in Warm Springs. The property played a major role in her life, but financial difficulties continued to plague her, not least because of numerous friends and relatives who lived there with her. She took in boarders in 1917 and nearly lost the house four years later. Meanwhile, Johnston's increasing activism and unconventional writing led to a sharp decline in her commercial popularity. Still, her death on May 9, 1936, of Bright's disease, made national headlines. In his eulogy, Arthur Goodrich reflected, "Each generation contributes to the world, too sparingly, its tiny few are the truly great. Mary Johnston was, I believe, one of those few in our time."

Major Works

Novels

• Prisoners of Hope (1898)
• To Have and to Hold (1900)
• Audrey (1902)
• Sir Mortimer (1904)
• Lewis Rand (1908)
• The Long Roll (1911)
• Cease Firing (1912)
• Hagar (1913)
• The Witch (1914)
• The Fortunes of Garin (1915)
• The Wanderers (1917)
• Foes (1918)
• Michael Forth (1920)
• Sweet Rocket (1920)
• Silver Cross (1922)
• 1492 (1922)
• Croatan (1924)
• The Slave Ship (1925)
• The Great Valley (1926)
• The Exile (1927)
• Hunting Shirt (1932)
• Miss Delicia Allen (1933)
• Drury Randall (1935)

Plays and Short Stories

• The Goddess of Reason (1907)
• The Collected Short Stories of Mary Johnston (Edited by Annie Woodbridge and Hensley C. Woodbridge, 1982)

Nonfiction

• Pioneers of the Old South (1918)
• The Status of Women (Equal Suffrage League of Virginia, 1909)

Time Line

• November 21, 1870 - Mary Johnston is born in Buchanan, Virginia.
• 1900 - Mary Johnston's To Have and to Hold is published in novel form and becomes her first major success.
• 1921 - Mary Johnston, having been a member of the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia since 1909, hails the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution which grants women the right to vote.
• May 9, 1936 - Mary Johnston dies of Bright's disease and is buried in Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond.

Further Reading

Contributed by Samuel Pyeatt Menefee and Clayton McClure Brooks.  Samuel Pyeatt Menefee is a former Rhodes Scholar with degrees from Yale, Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, and the University of Virginia. He is affiliated with the Center for Oceans Law & Policy, the Center for National Security Law, and World Maritime University, and is author of several pieces in the Dictionary of National Biography of Wives for Sale: An Ethnographic Study of British Popular Divorce (1981), and of Trends in Maritime Violence (1996).  Clayton McClure Brooks is a National Governors Association postdoctoral fellow in residence at the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library. She is the editor of A Legacy of Leadership: Governors and American History (2008). 

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