The Story of Mary MacLane

An excerpt of a review from Book News, Volume 20: This is a book to create an instantaneous sensation. The mere fact that its author is but a girl of nineteen years of age and yet entertains such positively morbid views of life and all pertaining to life is sufficient to arouse the interest of the world near and far. Notoriety, at least, if not the exalted fame for which she craves, will undoubtedly be the portion of this warped-souled creature, Mary MacLane. For...
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An excerpt of a review from Book News, Volume 20:

This is a book to create an instantaneous sensation. The mere fact that its author is but a girl of nineteen years of age and yet entertains such positively morbid views of life and all pertaining to life is sufficient to arouse the interest of the world near and far. Notoriety, at least, if not the exalted fame for which she craves, will undoubtedly be the portion of this warped-souled creature, Mary MacLane. For warped-souled she surely is. Hers is either a case for a specialist on nervous disorders or it is a psychological problem that up to the present time has not been equalled.

Mary MacLane, from her own portrayal, is a child of the far West. Her home is a little mountain town nestled snugly down amid some of nature's most potently effective charms, a town enviably environed, but possessing no opportunities for satisfying the ambitions of a bright, intelligent, ambitious girl, and ambitious without limit is Mary MacLane. Yet instead of imbuing herself with the beauties of the natural world around her, instead of learning from the hills, the woods and the exquisite music of the waters, this lesson of life's sweet joyousncss, this girl, now almost a woman, has permitted the poison of insatiable longing to eat away the luscious fruit of her natural soul, and with the shrunken core now worries out existence in the dreams of what she would have herself to be.

Great is the man who can gracefully adapt himself to his surroundings. Greater far would be Mary MacLane had she accomplished a pleasant, contented life among her native kinsfolk.

But no, the seed of that deadly egotism, of that rank dissatisfaction and discontentment, was there, and its possessor, by reading books most calculated to engender and increase it, by continuous thought and brooding over it, and by courting the solitude of her own distorted meditation, has worked herself into a state now seemingly bordering upon insanity. The almost unprecedented egotism with which she asserts her unique genius, the scorn and contempt with which she looks upon her immediate fellow-beings, the confidence with which she awaits glory, is almost hideous, though in some degree pitiable, to contemplate.

Mary MacLane is, after all, but a type, an exaggerated type, and in her, many inhabitants of small, isolated towns and villages will discover their counterpart. From them she may obtain the sympathy she so craves, but from the world at large the spreading of her name will bring but ridicule upon her. For her reading and meditations have deprived her of the acute sense of right and of the realization of wrong. They have deprived her of faith and made her an atheist; they have raised her so high in her own estimation that she can no longer value herself at a reasonable valuation. As a result she unblushingly steals and as unblushingly confesses it; she is blasphemous and sacrilegious; she is contemptibly egotistical. Of her soul little remains; her "young woman's body" she worships. She is sensual, grossly absorbed in things primarily material; she is sentimental, and her sentimentality has taken the odd turn of spending itself upon so poor a subject as the devil. Feeling that her hope for fame can in all probability never be realized, Mary MacLane hopes next, expects next, happiness; happiness unalloyed.