Marion is representative of a class of educated, well-travelled middle-class women of the late 19th and early 20th Century, who played a fundamental role in the evolution of how women were perceived and how they perceived themselves.
Ivy Deakin Brookes, daughter of Alfred Deakin. Ivy was an accomplished singer and musician, who married Herbert Brookes, a prominent businessman and politician (and brother of Norman, the first Australian to win Wimbledon).
Helen Hunt Jackson
Maria Mitchell, Lecturer in Astronomy at Vassar. Maria was a legendary teacher who inspired generations of young women. Her motto was “Go to the source.”
Alice K Wellman was born in San Francisco. Her father was a successful businessman. She was at Vassar music college with Marion and in 1878 they both studied music in Berlin. The following year they went on the Grand Tour with Alice’s mother and sisters. Alice travelled widely and in 1899 visited Marion in Queenstown, where she met George Beardsley, an American metallurgist who had been in Australia since the early 1890s. They subsequently married and lived for 2 years in Queenstown, returning to California in 1903. Alice died in 1936.
Mary Hallock Foote was the woman upon whom Wallace Stegner based his Pulitzer Prize winning novel “Angle of Repose.”
Mary Hallock Foote near the site of her home in Boise. Her husband’s great dream of an irrigation scheme drained their fortune and Mary’s health. She supplemented their income with her illustrations and novels.
Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin
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