Marion Harland

Marion Harland was the pen name of Mary Virginia Hawes Terhune, a Virginia novelist and prolific writer on household life. Marion Harland’s Complete Etiquette was prepared with her daughter, Virginia Terhune Van de Water, and presented itself as a young people’s guide to social occasions. The Bobbs-Merrill volume treats introductions, calls, correspondence, travel, weddings, hospitality, and conduct in public, translating customary rules into practical advice for everyday situations. Its revised and enlarged form reflects the authors’ effort to keep the guidance usable as social habits changed. Harland’s authority in this field grew from a career that joined fiction with cookbooks and domestic manuals, while Van de Water also developed a substantial writing career of her own. Read within that wider body of work, Marion Harland’s Complete Etiquette shows how two generations of professional writers turned observation of American home and social life into an organized reference book.