Mrs. Mary Jane Holmes, a family favorite for fifty years, was born at
Brookfield, Massachusetts, April 5, 1828. She became a teacher at an
early age, and at Allen's Hill, New York, on August 9, 1849, she was
married to Daniel Holmes, a Yale man of the class of 1848, who had
been teaching the year between his graduation and marriage at
Versailles, Kentucky. Immediately after the ceremony he and his bride
started to Kentucky, where Mrs. Holmes joined her husband in teaching.
In 1850 they gave up the school at Versailles, taking charge of the
district school at Glen's Creek, near Versailles. Here they taught for
two years, when Mr. Holmes decided to relinquish teaching for the
practice of law, and they removed to Brockport, New York, their home
henceforth. Mrs. Holmes returned to Kentucky in 1857, for a visit, and
this, with the three years indicated above, included her Kentucky
life. Having settled at Brockport, she began her career as a novelist.
Her first and best known book, _Tempest and Sunshine, or Life in
Kentucky_, was published in 1854. Mr. Middleton, one of the chief
characters in this novel, was a rather close characterization of a
Kentucky planter, Mr. Singleton, who resided some miles from
Versailles; and his daughter, Sue Singleton, subsequently Mrs. Porter,
always claimed, though facetiously, that she was the original of
_Tempest_. It is now known, however, that Mrs. Holmes had not thought
of her in delineating the character, and that the Singleton home is
the only thing in the book that is drawn from actual life with any
detail whatever. In her Kentucky books that followed _Tempest and
Sunshine_, she usually built an accurate background for characters
that lived only in her imagination. Besides _Tempest and Sunshine_,
Mrs. Holmes was the author of thirty-four books, published in the
order given: _The English Orphans_; _Homestead on the Hillside_, a
book of Kentucky stories; _Lena Rivers_, a Kentucky novel, superior to
_Tempest and Sunshine_; _Meadow Brook_; _Dora Deane_; _Cousin Maude_;
_Marian Grey_, a Kentucky story; _Darkness and Daylight_; _Hugh
Worthington_, another Kentucky novel; _The Cameron Pride_; _Rose
Mather_; _Ethelyn's Mistake_; _Millbank_; _Edna Browning_; _West
Lawn_; _Edith Lyle_; _Mildred_; _Daisy Thornton_; _Forrest House_;
_Chateau D'Or_; _Madeline_; _Queenie Hetherton_; _Christmas Stories_;
_Bessie's Fortune_; _Gretchen_; _Marguerite_; _Dr. Hathern's
Daughters_; _Mrs. Hallam's Companion_; _Paul Ralston_; _The Tracy
Diamonds_; _The Cromptons_; _The Merivale Banks_; _Rena's Experiment_;
and _The Abandoned Farm_. About two million copies of Mrs. Holmes's
books have been sold by her authorized publishers; how many have been
sold in pirated editions cannot, of course, be ascertained. Mrs.
Holmes died at Brockport, New York, October 6, 1907.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Allibone's _Dictionary of Authors_ (Philadelphia,
1897, v. ii); _The Nation_ (October 10, 1907).