Author, diarist. Born in Abbeville District, Mary Moragn\u00e9 was the eldest of eleven children of Isaac Moragn\u00e9, a planter, and Margaret Blanton Caine. Moragn\u00e9 grew up on her father\u2019s small plantation, Oakwood, near New Bordeaux. Her formal education consisted of attending neighborhood schools and local female academies. She was an avid reader and began writing at an early age. She was a keen observer of both the social and the natural worlds around her and recorded these observations in a journal that she began keeping in 1834.<\/p>\n
In the fall of 1838 Moragn\u00e9 entered a fiction-writing contest sponsored by the Augusta Mirror <\/em>literary magazine. Her entry, a short historical romance entitled The British Partizan, <\/em>was awarded first prize. The novel was based on the life of her maternal grandfather\u2019s uncle, a British sympathizer during the Revolutionary War. Published in the Mirror <\/em>in installments from December 15, 1838, through January 26, 1839, it was immediately popular. Within a month after its appearance, the Mirror<\/em>\u2019s editor William Tappan Thompson published the novel in book format. He became an early, enthusiastic supporter of Moragn\u00e9 and from 1838 through 1842 printed everything she submitted, including her second short novel, The Rencontre <\/em>(1841), as well as several excerpts from her journal and some of her poems.<\/p>\n Moragn\u00e9\u2019s work was well received by her contemporaries. A favorable review appeared in the Knickerbocker <\/em>in May 1839, recommending The British Partizan <\/em>to its readership. Thompson continued to heap praise on her, admiring her style of composition over all other contributors to the Mirror. <\/em>The writer and editor William Gilmore Simms recommended Moragn\u00e9 for inclusion in Evert and George Duyckinck\u2019s anthology of American literature, although in the end she was not mentioned there.<\/p>\n In the fall of 1842 Moragn\u00e9 married William Hervey Davis, a Presbyterian minister and pastor of the nearby Willington Presbyterian Church. Together they had nine children. At the time of her marriage, Moragn\u00e9 began to question the propriety of writing romantic fiction, and much to the consternation of her publishers and some family members, she gave it up. She did, however, continue to produce poetry and articles of a religious nature. In 1888 she published a book of her collected poems, Lays from the Sunny Lands. <\/em>She also wrote two textbooks, one on biblical history and the other on science, but was unable to get either work published.<\/p>\n Moragn\u00e9 is best remembered, however, not for her early fiction or poems, but for her unpublished journals covering the years 1834\u20131842, 1863, 1867, and 1899\u20131903. They provide readers with careful descriptions and observations of family and community life in the rural South. Their focus is on neither the gentry nor the uneducated, but on the lives of the common folk of the Carolina upcountry\u2013what they thought, how they managed, what they did for entertainment, and the role religion and family played in their lives. In 1951 Moragn\u00e9\u2019s early journals were published by her great-granddaughter Delle Mullen Craven under the title The Neglected Thread: A Journal from the Calhoun Community, 1836\u20131842.<\/em><\/p>\n Moragn\u00e9 died in 1903 in Talladega, Alabama. She is buried there in Oak Hill Cemetery.<\/p>\n Craven, Delle Mullen. \u201cThe Unpublished Diaries of Mary Moragn\u00e9 Davis.\u201d In South Carolina Women Writers: Proceedings of the Reynolds Conference,<\/em> University of South Carolina, October 24\u201325, 1975, <\/em>edited by James B. Meriwether. Spartanburg, S.C.: Reprint Company, 1979.<\/p>\n Endres, Karen A. \u201cMary Moragn\u00e9\u2019s The British Partizan.<\/em>\u201d In South Carolina Women Writers: Proceedings of the Reynolds Conference, University of South Carolina, October 24\u201325, 1975, <\/em>edited by James B. Meriwether. Spartanburg, S.C.: Reprint Company, 1979.<\/p>\n Moragn\u00e9, Mary E. The Neglected Thread: A Journal from the Calhoun Com<\/em>munity, 1836\u20131842. <\/em>Edited by Delle Mullen Craven. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1951.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Author, diarist. Born in Abbeville District, Mary Moragn\u00e9 was the eldest of eleven children of Isaac Moragn\u00e9, a planter, and Margaret Blanton Caine. Moragn\u00e9 grew up on her father\u2019s small plantation, Oakwood, near New Bordeaux. Her formal education consisted of attending neighborhood schools and local female academies. She was an avid reader and began writing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":-1,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","class_list":["post-8841","entry","type-entry","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","ecms-a-z","ecms-abbeville-county","ecms-encyclopedia","ecms-industry-and-the-gilded-age-1878-1889","ecms-literature","ecms-m","ecms-reconstruction-1866-1877","ecms-religion","ecms-the-antebellum-south-1816-1860","ecms-turn-of-the-century-1890-1913","ecms-u-s-civil-war-1861-1865","ecms-upstate"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n