Mary Johnston

Mary Johnston (1870–1936) was an American novelist from Virginia and one of the best-selling writers of her generation. Her second book, To Have and to Hold (1900), a romance of colonial Virginia, was the top-selling novel in the United States that year and was twice filmed. She followed it with Audrey, Sir Mortimer and a series of historical novels, including The Long Roll (1911) and Cease Firing (1912), a two-part account of the Confederate army in which Stonewall Jackson appears as a character. An active suffragist, she co-founded the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia. Her later novels, among them The Slave Ship (1924), grew more inward and mystical in manner.