Maria James (poet)

Maria James (October 11, 1793 – September 11, 1868) was a Welsh-born American poet and domestic servant.

Personal life

Maria James was born in 1793, in Wales. She was about seven years old when she emigrated with her family, landing at Dutchess County, New York, where her father worked at the slate quarries. She began working as a domestic servant at age 10, for the family of Rev. Freeborn Garrettson. She died in Rhinebeck, New York in 1868, age 74.[1]

Poetry

When she was forty years old, and still at service, a professor at Union College, Alonzo Potter, learned from his wife that Miss James wrote poetry. He prepared a collection of her works for publication, and they appeared in volume form, as Wales and Other Poems, in 1839. Potter's long introduction to the collection assures readers that Maria James "solaced a life of labour with intellectual occupations," and that "her achievements should be made known to repress the supercilious pride of the privileged and educated."[2]

References

  1. ↑ James Grant Wilson and John Fiske, eds., Appleton's Cyclopaedia of American Biography (1887): 399.
  2. ↑ Alonzo Potter, "Introduction" in Maria James, Wales and Other Poems (John S. Taylor 1839): 29–30.
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