Educated in Richmond, she spent time in the vacation with her uncle Sir David Dundas, who hosted many scientists and academics, which inspired her as a writer.

[7] A few years later her father was appointed commissioner of the naval dockyard in Cape Town, where he died in 1814, aged 58, having been promoted rear-admiral just two months earlier.

An extract of Maria's letter to Henry Warburton giving an account of the earthquake was published in 1824 in the Transactions of the Geological Society of London.

It was agreed that Graham should become the tutor of the young Princess Maria da Gloria, so when she reached London, she just handed over the manuscripts of her two new books to her publisher (Journal of a Residence in Chile during the Year 1822.

During her few months with the royal family, she developed a close friendship with the empress, Maria Leopoldina of Austria, who passionately shared her interests in the natural sciences.

Her treatment by palace courtiers left her with ambivalent feelings about Brazil and its government; she later recorded her version of events in her unpublished manuscript "Memoir of the Life of Don Pedro".

After her return from Brazil in 1825, her publisher John Murray asked her to write a book about the famous and recently completed voyage of HMS Blonde to the Sandwich Islands (as Hawaii was then known).

In 1828, immediately after returning from their honeymoon, she had published A Short History of Spain, and in 1835 the writings during her long convalescence resulted in the publication of two books; Description of the chapel of the Annunziata dell’Arena; or Giotto’s Chapel in Padua, and her first and most famous book for children, Little Arthur’s History of England, which has been reprinted numerous times since then (already in 1851 the 16th edition was published, and it was last reprinted in 1981).

Besides describing the earthquake in her Journal of a Residence in Chile,[9] she had also written about it in more detail in a letter to Henry Warburton, who was one of the Geological Society's founding fathers.

Her husband and her brother offered to duel Greenough, but she said, according to her nephew John Callcott Horsley, "Be quiet, both of you, I am quite capable of fighting my own battles, and intend to do it".

She went on to publish a crushing reply to Greenough, and was shortly thereafter backed by none other than Charles Darwin, who had observed the same land rising during Chile's earthquake in 1835, aboard the Beagle.

She continued to write until the very end, and her last book was A Scripture Herbal, an illustrated collection of tidbits and anecdotes about plants and trees mentioned in the Bible, which was published the same year she died.

In recognition of her services to Chile, as being one of the first persons to write about the young nation in the English language, the Chilean government paid for the restoration of Maria and Augustus Callcott's joint grave in Kensal Green Cemetery in London in 2008.

The restoration was finalised with a commemorative plaque, unveiled by the Chilean ambassador to the United Kingdom, Rafael Moreno, at a ceremony on 4 September 2008.