Decades ago, likely sometime in the 90s, I ran into Mary MacLane in the pages of a book called In the Realms of the Unreal, an anthology of “insane writings”.
Not long after, sparked by finding a first edition of her debut, The Story of Mary MacLane—By Herself, in a used bookstore in upstate New York, I dove head-first and in true autistic “special interest” fashion (although this was decades before I knew I was autistic) into intensive research for months and months, including contacting the Montana Historical Society and receiving a small stack of material from them.
Somewhere I think I still have both the first edition and the short stack of historical society material.
Not long after, I even found, I think in the New York State Library, a copy of a satirical, anonymous “reply” from the devil she spoke of so much in her first book. I noticed today that even that has joined most of her own work in being made available for Kindle.
Every now and then, she comes to mind (today, it was sparked by something someone said on Twitter that reminded me I own a first edition of Franny and Zooey), and I check to see what the internet has revealed since the last time.
Well.
Here we are in 2019, and MacLane actually has an entry in the Encyclopedia Britannica, of all things. There’s even an entry at the Women Film Pioneers Project out of Columbia University.
How times change.