Genius of a kind has always been with me; an empty heart that has taken on a certain wooden quality; an excellent, strong woman's body and a pitiably starved soul.

In her writings Mary MacLane compared herself to another frank young memoirist Marie Bashkirtseff who died a few years after MacLane was born and H. ". Mary MacLane (May 1 1881 — August 1929) was a controversial Canadian-born American writer whose frank memoirs helped uMary MacLaner in the confessional style of autobiographical writing.