Maria Thompson Daviess

Maria Thompson Daviess (1872–1924) was an American novelist and painter born in Harrodsburg, Kentucky, who studied art in Paris and lived most of her adult life in Nashville, Tennessee. Her first success, The Melting of Molly in 1912, a comic diary of a young widow's diet, set the tone for a run of cheerful, sentimental novels of Southern and New York life, among them The Tinder Box, The Golden Bird and Blue-grass and Broadway. She was an active suffragist in Tennessee, served in a women's war relief organization during the First World War and published an autobiography, Seven Times Seven, in 1924, the year of her death.