Tenting at Stony Beach

From The National Cyclopaedia:
Pool, Maria Louise, author, was born at Rockland (then East Abington), Mass., Aug. 20, 1841, daughter of Elias and Lydia (Lane) Pool. She received her education at the public schools of her native place. She began to write early, and before she was out of her teens became a contributor to the "Galaxy" and other magazines. In 1870 she removed to Brooklyn, and after fulfilling an engagement to write exclusively for a Philadelphia paper, she began a connection with the "Evening Post" and the "Tribune," of New York, which laid the foundation of her reputation. in the latter paper her sketches, dated from Ransom, were very favorably noticed for their almost photographic fidelity to New England country life, and their qualities of humor and pathos. Among her notable productions in book form are found: "A Vacation in a Buggy" (New York, 1887); "Tenting at Stony Beach" (Boston, 1888); "Dally" (1891); "Roweny in Boston" (1892); "Mrs. Keats Bradford" (1892); "Katharine North" (1893); "The Two Salomes" (1893); "Out of Step" (1894); "Against Human Nature" (1895); "Mrs. Gerald" (1896); "In the First Person" (1898); "Boss and Other Dogs" (1898); "A Golden Song" (1898), and "The Meloon Farm" (1899). Miss Pool died in Rockland, Mass., in 1898.

Note from the editor: Maria Louise Pool lived for 32 years with her "literary companion," Caroline M. Branson, in Brooklyn, New York, Wrentham, Mass., and for the last four years of her life in Rockland, Mass. Their house stands on Liberty Street in Rockland, near the corner of East Water Street. Maria Pool wrote openly about her companionship with Caroline Branson, a relationship sometimes described as a "Boston Marriage" in the late 19th century. The two women are buried together in Mt. Pleasant Cemetary in Rockland, Mass. Maria Pool lived a modest lifestyle typical of rural New England at the time, and she was not an active participant in urban bohemian artistic circles or an outspoken reformer. (Pool's contacts and friendships with other women writers of the time has yet to be explored.) Her writing represents a remarkably open depiction of a homosexual couple in the late Victorian era, a record of a time in which the lives of many commonplace homosexuals has been purged from historical records. As Amand M. Hale writes in her biography, the lives these women shared was too important to be written off as simply friends or housemates, or left to be read between the lines. Maria Pool mainly wrote genre stories about rural girls and women (and their pet dogs). The stongest themes of love and companionship between women can be found in "Tenting at Stony Beach," "Roweny in Boston," and the companion novel "Mrs. Keats Bradford," "Sand 'n' Bushes" (set in Provincetown, Mass., in the 1890's), and "In a Dike Shanty."

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