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Margaret Deland (1857-1945)
Margaret Deland was born shortly before the Civil War began and died shortly before World War II ended. A woman of two centuries, Deland was distinctly upper middle class, happily married, and moderate in her approach to social issues. Yet, as a writer, she often was criticized for her incisive portrayals of people caught in the tangle of ethical and social dilemmas. Over the years, critics and readers accused her of attacking religion, advocating free love, approving of adultery, being a pacifist, and criticizing good women.
Deland's first novel, John Ward, Preacher (1888), brought her immediate recognition and censure. The novel concerns a rigidly doctrinaire Calvinist minister and his liberal wife, who does not believe in original sin or eternal damnation and finally leaves her husband because he insists that she accept his beliefs. In spite of society and family pressure to accept her husband's direction, the young wife tells him, "I must believe what my own soul asserts, or I am untrue to myself" (99). Deland's attack on traditional orthodoxy received widespread, and often vehement, criticism from both the clergy and secular groups. Ministers attacked the novel from the pulpit, the Boston YWCA refused to put a copy in its library, and Deland's Calvinist family was reluctant to receive her. The religious ideas in the novel captured reviewers' attention, but most seemed unaware of Deland's other major theme: a woman's right to enjoy independent thought and to reject her husband's authority. The novel's two subjects -- the dangers of fanaticism and women's need for independent ideas and actions -- remained Deland's central themes throughout her long career.
In spite of her sometimes unconventional ideas, Deland was a product of the nineteenth-century middle class. Born Margaretta Wade Campbell, on 23 February 1857, in Allegheny, a suburb of Pittsburgh, she was orphaned as a toddler and went to live with her aunt and uncle, Lois and Benjamin Bakewell Campbell, and their children on their estate near Allegheny. Although the Campbells enjoyed a Southern lifestyle involving frequent visitors, black servants, horses and dogs, and a disdain for Yankee thrift, the family embraced a stern Calvinism emphasizing hell and damnation. Whenever Deland visited her maternal grandparents in Pittsburgh, however, she was in a more relaxed...