Moral Boston

Now sweet and gracious Mary

     Has flitted to New York;

Where vainly do the papers

     Beg her to write or talk.

This is a blow at Gotham,

     For here you have the rub:

She couldn’t find a “devil”

     In Cambridge or the Hub.

c. Aug. 14, 1902

"Had I been born a man," Mary MacLane writes in her 1902 debut The Story of Mary MacLane, "I would by now have made a deep impression on the world." These blunt words of a 19-year-old girl in Butte, Montana, are found in what theThe New York Times called the "first of the confessional diaries" in America. Just months after finishing high school, MacLane, a self-proclaimed "genius," sent her manuscript to Chicago publisher George H. Doran, who "discovered the most astounding and revealing piece of realism I had read"—this, coming from the publisher of Arthur Conan Doyle, P.G. Wodehouse, and Theodore Roosevelt—but "clearly, we could not publish it." Doran forwarded the manuscript to Herbert S. Stone & Company, and they published it immediately.

*        *               *

MacLane creates the "Devil," an imaginary creature who created her "without a conscience," a primary character in her diaries, representing experience, sensuality, and hedonism. She alternates between lust and admiration for the Devil, impatiently waiting to join his world of pleasure. He "constructed a place of infinite torture—the fair green earth, the world. But he has made that other infinite thing—Happiness." MacLane calls on the Devil to release her from mind-numbing, small-town life—and begs for marriage. The Devil asks, "If I were to marry you how long would you be happy?" "For three days." (She also wrote of marrying Napoleon for three days.). "You are wonderfully wise in some things," he replies, "though you are still very young."

http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/03/the-forgotten-story-of-mary-maclane-1902s-racy-angsty-teenage-diarist/274149/