Mary Marie
About this audiobook
Eleanor H. Porter’s most famous literary creation is Pollyanna, but she isn’t the only precocious young girl to spring from the author’s pen. Mary Marie Anderson describes herself as “a cross-current and a contradiction", the offspring of incompatible parents who couldn’t even agree about her name. When the two divorce when she is thirteen, Mary Marie is delighted since she’s always liked being different. None of the other girls have two homes and spend six months with each parent! Father will remain in their small town and mother will live in Boston with her family.
This exciting development persuades Mary Marie to keep a diary that she plans to turn into a novel. Surely one of her parents will remarry and provide the romance to spice up her story. But adolescence is not an easy time of life, and harsh reality intervenes when she discovers that 1920s America is not always tolerant of divorce. Over time, being fun-loving Marie in the city and sober Mary in the country becomes confusing and wears thin. She’s always liked being different, but not being two different girls! Worst of all, why can’t either of her parents find someone new and turn her novel into a love story?
About the author
Born in Littleton, New Hampshire, on December 19, 1868, Eleanor Emily Hodgman studied singing at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. She gained a local reputation as a singer in concerts and church choirs and continued her singing career after her marriage in 1892 to John L. Porter, a businessman. By 1901, however, she had abandoned music in favor of writing. Eleanor's stories began appearing in numerous popular magazines and newspapers, and in 1907 she published her first novel, Cross Currents. There followed The Turn of the Tide; The Story of Marco; Miss Billy, her first really successful book; and Miss Billy's Decision. In 1913, Porter published Pollyanna, a sentimental tale of a most improbable heroine, a young girl whose "glad game" of always looking for and finding the bright side of things somehow reforms her antagonists, restores hope to the hopeless, and generally rights the wrongs of the world. The book's immediate and enormous popularity—in countless reprinted editions it eventually sold over a million copies—must be attributed to the American reading public's eagerness for reassurance that rural virtues and cheerful optimism still existed, as well as to Porter's skill in blending dashes of social conscience and ironic distance into the sentimentalism of her message. Pollyanna, which was second on the fiction bestseller list for 1914, was followed by Pollyanna Grows Up. It also was made into a Broadway play starring Helen Hayes and then into a motion picture starring Mary Pickford, and it inspired a veritable industry for related books and products. "Glad clubs" sprang up around the country and then abroad as Pollyanna was translated into several foreign languages. Eleanor Porter's other books include the bestsellers Just David, The Road to Understanding, Oh, Money! Money! Dawn, and Mary-Marie. Many of her more than 200 stories were collected in Across the Years, The Tie that Binds, and the posthumously published Money, Love and Kate, Little Pardner, and Just Mother. Porter died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on May 21, 1920.
Anne Hancock began her career with the Library of Congress's National Library Service (NLS) Talking Books Program, where she has narrated more than 300 audiobooks in a variety of genres. An AudioFile Earphones Award winner, she has lived in France and the Netherlands and uses her training in the languages of both countries in her narration. In addition, she has successfully narrated books with English and Irish accents.
