Mary Virginia Terhune (née Hawes, December 21, 1830 – June 3, 1922), also known by her penname Marion Harland, was an American author who was prolific and bestselling in both fiction and non-fiction genres.

Born in Amelia County, Virginia, she began her career writing articles at the age of 14, using various pennames until 1853, when she settled on Marion Harland.

[1] For fifteen years she was a prolific writer of best-selling women's novels, classified then as "plantation fiction", as well as writing numerous serial works, short stories, and essays for magazines.

In the 1870s, shortly after the birth of her last son Albert Payson, she published Common Sense in the Household: A Manual of Practical Housewifery, a cookbook and domestic guide for housewives that became a huge bestseller, eventually selling more than one million copies over several editions.

Terhune began to concentrate on non-fiction, publishing additional cookbooks and domestic works, as well as biographies, travel guides, and histories.

In 1853, she won a contest held by The Southern Era with her serial novel, Kate Harper, which was published under the pen name Marion Harland.

[2][4] After their marriage, Mary Terhune continued writing fiction, publishing a novel a year and monthly episodes of serial works.

[4] A few years after their move, the Civil War (1861–1865) cut Mary off from her family, including her brothers who fought for the Confederacy (she supported the Union).

Though she frequently wrote about the South in her novels both before and after the war, and expressed her great love of her home state, she lived in the North with her husband for most of her life.

[3] After finding current cookbooks less than helpful, Terhune followed her friends' advice and began collecting her own tested recipes, which she wrote in a more accessible manner.

[1] After she broke her wrist in her seventies, she learned to type and wrote Marion Harland's Autobiography, in which she reminisced about the pre-Civil War South where she was raised.

[3] Terhune's first writings, written under a more masculine pseudonym when she was 14, were evangelical essays for the Watchman and Observer, a weekly religious paper.

Her early novels all featured a romantic story element, with many also including "sensational episodes-murders, fires, accidents, and sudden deaths."

They also noted that she was critical of various social institutions considered acceptable in the antebellum South, including slavery and marriages between close relatives.

[3] After her shift in the 1870s to writing more non-fiction works, Harland continued to explore contemporary issues of women in her occasional novels and short stories.

While other of her novels she wrote during this time were criticized for lacking believability and drawing out the heroine's suffering, Terhune is considered always to have "told a good story".

Once her domestic authority was established, Terhune became a Chautauqua lecturer, speaking primarily to women on topics of home and family.