Maria Thompson Daviess

Maria Thompson Daviess (1872–1924) was born in Harrodsburg, Kentucky, and raised in Nashville after her father's early death; she studied at Wellesley College and later in Paris, where she trained and exhibited as a miniature painter before turning to fiction. Her first novel, Miss Selina Lue and the Soap-box Babies (1909), launched a prolific run of light Southern romances, including the bestselling The Melting of Molly (1912) and Blue-grass and Broadway (1919), serialized the year before in Harper's Bazar. She was also active in the Tennessee suffrage movement, co-founding the Nashville chapter of the Equal Suffrage League. She died in New York City at fifty-one, unmarried.