Picture of author.

Maria Thompson Daviess (1) (1872–1924)

Autor(a) de The Melting of Molly

Para outros autores com o nome Maria Thompson Daviess, ver a página de desambiguação.

18 Works 94 Membros 6 Críticas 1 Favorited

About the Author

Image credit: Portrait of Maria Thompson Daviess by Ella Sophonisba Hergesheimer, frontispiece of Anne Ashley's master's thesis, "Harpeth Valley in the Fiction of Maria Thompson Daviess," 1935.

Séries

Obras por Maria Thompson Daviess

The Melting of Molly (1912) 32 exemplares
The Road to Providence (1910) 8 exemplares
Rose of Old Harpeth (1911) 7 exemplares
Andrew the Glad (1913) 6 exemplares
Over Paradise Ridge, A Romance (1915) 6 exemplares
The Tinder Box (1913) 4 exemplares
The Golden Bird (1918) 4 exemplares
The Heart's Kingdom (1917) 4 exemplares
The Daredevil (1916) 3 exemplares
Blue-grass and Broadway (1919) 2 exemplares
The matrix (1920) 2 exemplares
Phyllis (1914) 2 exemplares

Etiquetado

Conhecimento Comum

Data de nascimento
1872-11-25
Data de falecimento
1924-09-03
Sexo
female
Nacionalidade
USA
Local de nascimento
Harrodsburg, Kentucky, USA
Local de falecimento
New York, New York, USA
Locais de residência
Harrodsburg, Kentucky, USA
Nashville, Tennessee, USA
Paris, France
New York, New York, USA
Educação
Peabody College, Nashville, Tennessee
Wellesley College
Ocupações
artist
art teacher
playwright
novelist
Organizações
Equal Suffrage League

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Her most famous novel, Miss Selma Lue, typifies her style of the excessive optimism associated with the Pollyanna school.
Some of her work developed from her devotion to woman suffrage, a cause she helped to win in Tennessee. Daviess was a charter member of the Nashville woman suffrage organization and founded the Madison organization after moving to Sweetbriar farm in 1915. She was living at her home in Madison when she wrote her autobiography, Seven Times Seven (1923). At the time, Daviess was fighting severe articular rheumatism. She died as a result of the disease in 1924.

Membros

Críticas

Harder to enjoy because of the dialect, but still a heart warmer. Nice to have a main character from the other side of the tracks.
½
 
Assinalado
2wonderY | Feb 17, 2024 |
Sweet and relatively short. Molly is a 25-year-old widow. When she was a teenager, she was in love with Alfred, who left to pursue a career. In his absence, her friends and relatives push her into marrying Mr. Carter, an older man with little personality. Some time after his death she receives a letter saying that Alfred is coming home, with the express intention of renewing their courtship. He looks forward to finding Molly exactly as he left her eight years ago.
There's just one problem: Molly's married life consisted of rich foods and little to do, so she is not the thin wisp of a girl that she was at age 18.
She flees to her next-door neighbor, Doctor John Moore. Doctor Moore compliments Molly on her looks and isn't totally convinced that she needs to become "a string bean," but he offers her his medical advice when he sees that she is determined.
As the story progresses, it becomes clear how much Molly and the doctor have come to depend on each other. He is a widower with a young son, and Molly has become like a mother to little Billy. She stayed up nights walking him in the garden when he was cutting teeth. She regularly plays with him, teaches him and cuddles him.
Her friendship with his father the doctor is rather uncertain. By turns he is friendly or stern, helpful or admonishing, and while Molly trusts him, she can't help but occasionally get angry with him. She especially resents the calm interest he seems to take in her returning suitor Alfred.
As Molly slims down and gets some amazing new clothes, she starts to attract a lot of interest from a couple of the young men in town. She journalizes about her conflicting feelings and tries hard to ignore the ones that are the most obvious to the reader.
Molly is an easy-to-read narrator with a sprightly voice. This was a fun, engaging little story.
… (mais)
 
Assinalado
Alishadt | 4 outras críticas | Feb 25, 2023 |
 
Assinalado
2wonderY | 4 outras críticas | Aug 13, 2021 |
I unintentionally ended up with this book. . . what a delightful surprise! A Publisher's Weekly best seller of 1912, it's not a heavy weight read. It's probably the chick-lit of its time.

Molly is a young widow whose old flame is coming back to town. She's gained weight but wants to look her best and turns to her friend, the doctor who lives next door, for advice. (Clearly they didn't have enough diet books available in that time period.) The book chronicles her dieting, her friends and life in the small Southern town in which she lives. And she does end up with a beau/fiance in the end but it's not the one she originally set out for.

The way Daviess' describes the places and events draws you in and leaves you laughing. Example: "Men are very strange people. They are like those horrible sums in algebra that you think about and worry about and cry about and try to get help from other women about, and then all of a sudden X works itself out into perfectly good sense. Not that I thought about Mr. Carter (her deceased husband - it was not a match made in heaven, and she was pushed in to it by her relatives), poor man! When he wasn't right around I felt it best to forget him as much as I could, but it seems hard for other women to let you forget either your husband or theirs."

Or this gem, after Molly sneaks off to the city to buy clothes that aren't black but tells her relatives she is getting a tombstone for her deceased husband. On the train back she runs into a man she knows from town and he comments on her sad errand: "What's a woman going to say when she has a tombstone thrown in her face like that? I didn't say anything, but what I thought about Aunt Adeline filled a dreadful pause. Perfectly dumb and quiet I sat for an awful space of time and wondered just what I was going to do. Could a woman lie a monument into her suitcase?"

A light read from a by-gone era, fun with delightful prose.
… (mais)
 
Assinalado
SilverKitty | 4 outras críticas | Jul 18, 2013 |

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Associated Authors

R. M. Crosby Illustrator
Margaret Armstrong Cover designer

Estatísticas

Obras
18
Membros
94
Popularidade
#199,202
Avaliação
4.1
Críticas
6
ISBN
111
Marcado como favorito
1

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