"M" is for Moragné, Mary Elizabeth (ca. 1815-1903)

"M" is for Moragné, Mary Elizabeth (ca. 1815-1903). Author, diarist. A native of Abbeville District, Moragné entered a fiction writing sponsored by the Augusta Mirror, a literary magazine. Her entry, a short historical romance entitled The British Partizan, won first prize. The magazine published the novel in serialized form and in book format. This work and a second novel received favorable reviews in national publications. After marrying a Presbyterian clergyman, she began to question the propriety of writing romantic fiction and decided to give it up. As a teenager she had begun keeping a journal. These provide readers with careful descriptions and observations of family and community life in the rural South. Mary Elizabeth Moragné’s focus is on neither the gentry nor the uneducated, but on the lives of the common folk of the South Carolina upcountry.