[1] Although born to one of the most prominent Nova Scotia families, Maria was in great financial distress after her husband's death in 1810, and petitioned the UK government for a number of years before being awarded a pension.
She met David Collins, an officer in the Royal Marines, when he was stationed in Halifax after the Battle of Bunker Hill.
With the prospect of a long peace, his father, Major-General Arthur Tooker Collins (1718–1793) encouraged David to accept an appointment as Deputy Judge Advocate of the new colony to be established in Botany Bay.
She was not permitted to travel with him, as he was an officer, but it is unlikely she would have made the journey because there would have been no society of "civilised' women in the early days of the colony and because of her ill health.
David's younger brother George had married Mary Trelawny, an heiress, and lived at Ham House in Devon.
In these she updates him on family and political news but also voices her concerns that the expedition to Botany Bay has been forgotten and that "never was anything of the kind undertaken that seemed so little to interest the publick.
"[3] She supplied David with necessaries, sending out clothes, newspapers and Edmund Burke's pamphlet on HMS Gorgon, but urged him "to come home my dearest love and resume your place in the world and no longer be buried in oblivion."
In October 1793, Maria wrote to tell him that his father had died and the financial effects this had had on his family and his mother who was now forced to take lodgings in Plymouth.
"[3] In 1803, David returned to Australia, accepting a position of Lieutenant-Governor and to set up a new settlement at Sullivans Cove as a harbour for Hobart Town.
Her sister, who had married the Irishman General Thomas de la Cour Desbrisay, died in 1798 in Charlottetown, Canada[7] and Maria, worried about her health in 1804, asked her husband to support her mother.
According to a Trelawny descendant, "Many of Maria's novels were still in the family library at Ham [House, Plymouth] in 1900, but their titles have not been recorded and the books apparently destroyed during World War II.
She was sceptical that the Account would be a commercial success, writing to him in 1797/98 that "Those who published before the [expedition to Botany Bay] was new did not succeed, it is very unlikely you should now it is forgot but you are surely right to do the best you can.
She wrote the preface to the second edition, stating that her husband had started work on the Abridgement when "an appointment from his Sovereign called him to fulfil its duties in a distant country.
The exercise forced her to examine each page which meant that her "mind was by turns a prey to terror and disgust" and filled her with astonishment and compelled her to "condemn the temerity which could for a second time forgo every earthly enjoyment, a second time to encounter each species of hardship and all the cautious dangers so certainly attendant upon those who explore new and different climes a sacrifice for which no reward however liberal, no praise however loud, could offer any adequate recompense.
She petitioned Lord Bathurst, Secretary of State for the Colonies, in September 1812 that she "must now find a residence for myself; but where to turn; to what corner of the world, situated as I am, to direct my bewildered course?"
It transpired that before he left for Tasmania, Lord Hobart, who would become the Earl of Buckingham promised David, that if Maria's situation "should appear to be such as to require the aid of government, I should consider it my duty to support any application from her".
She left specific gifts of jewellery, including a gold watch set with pearls, gold enamelled watch keys, a rose diamond ring, a small garnet hoop rings, her books and a Jusia Japan box to her nieces and nephew and the widow of General Desborough.