Born into a family of farmers in Jefferson County, New York, Marietta Holley (July 16, 1836 - March 1, 1926) became one of America’s most prominent nineteenth-century humor writers, despite financial pressures which brought her formal education to a halt at the age of fourteen. She composed poetry as a young girl, but was quite secretive about her writing until it began to appear in the Jefferson Country Journal in 1857. Shy throughout her life, she always wrote under various pseudonyms and rarely traveled.

Soon, Holley’s writing was being published by popular magazines, like Peterson’s, where her most famous character, Samantha Smith Allen, first appeared in 1869. In 1872, when Elisha Bliss, Mark Twain’s publisher, commissioned her to write a vernacular novel, based on her popular essays, she began the first of her Samantha novels – My Opinions and Betsey Bobbet’s – which was published under the pseudonym “Josiah Allen’s Wife.”

The novel introduced Holley’s three main characters, who would dominate the more than twenty “Samantha” books Holley penned over her forty-one year career, including the bestseller Samantha at Saratoga (1887). Samantha is a rustic philosopher, aggressive and well-traveled. Holley uses Samantha’s common sense wisdom to defend women's rights, demonstrate the evils of liquor, poke fun at male pretensions, and satirize high society. Josiah Allen, Samantha’s husband, is half her size, weakly, bald, and impractical. Both Josiah and Betsey Bobbet, a stereotypical old maid, are firmly opposed to the widening of the woman’s “sphere.”

Holley became wealthy and relatively famous through her writing, yet she refused her publishers’ offers to give speeches or to travel (preferring to study guide books and maps when writing her travel books, like Samantha at the World’s Fair (1893)). Never marrying, she built a mansion on her father’s farm in Jefferson County, where she enjoyed the company of an adopted daughter and close friends.

Though Holley's novels were enormously popular throughout her life, they were rarely read after she died in the 1920s. Samantha, whose major concern was women’s suffrage, became anachronistic in the twentieth century. However, Holley deserves credit for creating the first comic female protagonist in American literature and for her ability to make the ideals of the suffrage and temperance movements more accessible through humor.

Selected Works by Marietta Holley

• "Preface," from My Opinions and Betsey Bobbet’s (Hartford: American Publishing Company, 1872).

• "Married to Josiah Allen," from My Opinions and Betsey Bobbet’s (Hartford: American Publishing Company, 1872).

• "A Allegory on Wimmen’s Rights," from My Opinions and Betsey Bobbet’s (Hartford: American Publishing Company, 1872).

• "An Unmarried Female," from My Opinions and Betsey Bobbet’s (Hartford: American Publishing Company, 1872).

• "Free Love Lectures," from My Opinions and Betsey Bobbet’s (Hartford: American Publishing Company, 1872).

• "Interview with Theodore and Victory," from My Opinions and Betsey Bobbet’s (Hartford: American Publishing Company, 1872).

• "Preface," from Samantha Among the Brethren (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1890).

• "Chapter I," from Samantha Among the Brethren (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1890).

• "Preface," from Samantha at the World’s Fair (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1893).

• "Chapter I," from Samantha at the World’s Fair (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1893).