Maria Callcott

MC did much of her early-nineteenth-century writing and publication under her first married name of Maria Graham. She is important both as a travel writer and as an art historian. Her writing of Europe and more distant countries is intelligent and enquiring (particularly into issues of race, class, and gender ignored by most of her contemporaries), polished, vividly descriptive, and reflective of an age of revolutions. She combines an enlightenment interest in non-European cultures and civilizations with attention to the conditions of women and of the oppressed. The same qualities inform her writings about art and history, including those for children. She also published scientific writing. She was successful in terms of sales, but curiously unacceptable, even from early in her career, to reviewers. Her Little Arthur's History of England sold prodigiously and became a household name.