Mary Gleed Tuttiett

Mary Gleed Tuttiett (11 December 1846 – 21 September 1923), better known by the pen name Maxwell Gray, was an English novelist and poet best known for her 1886 novel The Silence of Dean Maitland.

Life Tuttiett was born and brought up in Newport, Isle of Wight, the daughter of the surgeon Frank Bampfylde Tuttiett and his wife Elizabeth née Gleed.

Although largely self-educated, she attended Queen's College, London to train to be a governess. In early adulthood she visited London, various other parts of England, and Yverdon-les-Bains in Switzerland; but for the majority of her working life as a writer had constant debilitating illness from asthma and rheumatism —reports described her as "a confirmed invalid"—that left her unable to leave her bed for more than two to three hours a day. She wrote lying on a sofa.

For much of her life she lived and worked confined to her home in Newport, first at Pyle Street (where works up to The Last Sentence were written) and such themes appear in a number of her novels.

After her father's death in 1895, she moved to West Richmond, remaining in London until her death in 1923, aged 76, at Ealing. In 2023 the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography included her, Mrs. Disney Leith, Jean Middlemass, Florence L. Barclay, Gabrielle Wodnil and Bessie Marchant in new biographies of eleven Victorian writers who have caught the attention of academics.

Works Mary Tuttiett began her literary career by contributing essays, poems, articles, and short stories to various periodicals including Atalanta.

Her first novel, The Broken Tryst, was published in 1879 to lukewarm reviews, but Tuttiett achieved critical and popular success with the 1886 The Silence of Dean Maitland ("a powerful and impressive story, which was appreciated both by critics and by the public" The release saw a deal of speculation about the authorship, including theories that it has been written by a well-known ecclesiastic or the daughter of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

The Silence of Dean Maitland and a number of Mary Tuttiett's other novels are set in a fictionalised Isle of Wight, in which Newport, Calbourne, Swainstone, Brading and Arreton appear as "Oldport", "Malbourne", "Swaynestone", "Barling" and "Arden".

She also wrote a number of poetry anthologies.

In 1910, Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton's The World's Greatest Books said of The Silence of Dean Maitland that it had immediately and permanently established her name in the front rank of living novelists. in 1915 (under the title Sealed Lips) by John Ince, and in 1934 in Australia by Ken G. Hall. The Reproach of Annesley was filmed in 1915, and The Last Sentence in 1917.