His father was a noted preacher, and Edward Maitland was brought up among strict evangelical ideas, and rigorous theories about original sin and atonement.

[2] After education at a large private school in Brighton, he was admitted as a pensioner at Caius College, Cambridge, on 19 April 1843, and graduated B.A.

[3] He was destined by his family for the pulpit but was diverted from taking orders by doubts as to faith and vocation, and by the feeling that the church was rather "a tomb for the preservation of embalmed doctrines" than a living organism.

He went in 1849 to California, became one of the band of 'forty-niners,' and remained abroad, on the shores of the Pacific, mainly in America and Australia, where he became a commissioner of crown lands until the one year of absence had grown into nine.

Returning to England at the end of 1857, he devoted himself to literature, with the dominant aim of so developing the intuitional faculty to find the solution to all problems having their basis in man's spiritual nature, with a view to the formulation of a perfect system of thought and rule of life.Many of the vicissitudes of his life, both physical and mental, were recorded with but little distortion in his romance called The Pilgrim and the Shrine.

It was followed by a romance called The Higher Law (1869), which represents the escape of a youth from the trammels, no longer of orthodox religion, but of traditional morals.

Maitland became a figure in society, and was appreciated highly by Lord Houghton and Sir Francis Hastings Doyle.

His book By and By: an Historical Romance of the Future (1873) led to his making the acquaintance of Anna Kingsford, whom he visited at her husband's vicarage of Atcham, in Shropshire, in February 1874.

A striking parallel is afforded by the later life of Laurence Oliphant, with whom Maitland had a good deal in common, though he was constrained to express dissent from the spiritualistic theories embodied in 'Sympneumata.

[5] After the death of Anna Kingsford, in February 1888, Maitland lived alone at 1 Thurloe Square Studios, London, where he professed to receive continual 'illumination' from his former collaborator.

[2] Maitland was buried in Tonbridge cemetery on 5 October, by his wife Esther, who died in Australia, he left a son, a surgeon-major in the Bombay medical service.