Mary Heaton Vorse - Career

Career

Young Mary Heaton was intelligent and athletic and deeply influenced by the ideas of feminism that had begun to emerge as the 19th century wound to a close. Many upper-class women such as Mary were in the forefront of the movement for women's rights to economic independence, education, voting rights, and birth control.

In 1896, continuing earlier work in the field, Mary Heaton began to study at the Art Students' League, located on West 57th Street in New York City. The League was established 20 years earlier by strong-minded young men in rebellion from the conservative nature of the instruction at the National Academy of Design. By the time that Mary entered, the school was booming, with over 1100 pupils studying in sex-segregated day and evening classes, studying sketch art, sculpture, and painting. While Mary found participation in the artistic avant-garde exhilarating, she unfortunately was sadly lacking in talent. She wrote in her diary: "When I come into my room and see my work lying around, my sense of my own futility overwhelms me. After so much work, that is all I can do."

Under the influence of her first husband, Mary Heaton Vorse determined to herself become a professional writer. Mary began to create and sell romantic fiction to women's magazines. Her stories often featured the motif of a rugged and energetic heroine who managed to win the affection of a coveted male over a more constrained and conventionally feminine rival.

In 1904 Mary and Bert Vorse moved to Venice, where Mary was first introduced into the world of the working class and their labor struggles.

In her mid-40s, Mary entered into a common-law relationship with anarchist-turned-communist cartoonist Robert Minor beginning in 1920. She suffered a miscarriage of a child by Minor in 1922, with Minor leaving her for illustrator Lydia Gibson shortly thereafter. Vorse was despondent over her broken relationship and loss of her child and as a result of the medical treatment she received following her miscarriage, she became addicted to morphine and later alcohol. She did not shake her drug problems until early 1926, when she was finally able to return to writing again.