In the 1860s, Vovchok gained considerable literary fame in Ukraine after the publication in 1857 of a Ukrainian-language collection, "Folk Tales".

[citation needed] Mariya Vilinska was born in 1833 in the Oryol Governorate of the Russian Empire into the family of an army officer and a noblewoman.

After she lost her father at the age of 7, she was raised at her aunt's estate and then sent off to study first to Kharkov (now Kharkiv, Ukraine) and then to Oryol.

In 1851 she moved to Ukraine, having married Aphanasyy Markovych, a folklorist and ethnographer who was a member of the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius.

[9] From 1851 till 1858 she lived in Chernihiv, Kyiv and Nemyriv, assisting her husband with his ethnographic work and learning the Ukrainian culture and language.

[10] After a short stay in Saint Petersburg in 1859, Marko Vovchok moved to Central Europe, where she resided in Germany, France, Italy and Switzerland.

From 1867 to 1878, she again lived in Saint Petersburg, where due to the prohibition against the Ukrainian language she wrote and translated for Russian magazines.

Vovchok wrote in Russian Zhivaya dusha (The living soul, 1868), Zapiski prichyotnika (Notes of a junior deacon, 1870), V glushi (In the backwoods, 1875), and several other novels.

From 1878, she lived in the Northern Caucasus, and in 1885–1893 in Kiev Governorate, where she proceeded with her work on Ukrainian folklore and a dictionary.

1878 - remarries Mikhail Lobach-Zhuchenko, much younger than her, and for the next 30 years lives in her husband's places of service in various parts of the Russian Empire (Stavropol, Boguslav, Nalchik).

[11] These collections of folk stories were Vovchok's most influential and well-known works, as well as those that contributed to Ukrainian literary culture the most.

She often placed emphasis on her serf and peasant characters by leaving members of the aristocracy and landed gentry unnamed (referring to them as "master", "mistress", "old lady", etc.).

In addition, her stories are often narrated by serf or free peasant women with an emphasis on Ukrainian vernacular.

[11] Vovchok's stories often have a rhythmic narration and many epithets, calling back to her folk song influences.

In her stories about freed serfs and free Ukrainian peasants, Vovchok's plots also often leaned toward Romanticism.

She outlines the way that masters often treated young girls on their estates, and the attitudes of other serfs in the household who are unable or unwilling to look after each other.

Referred to throughout the story as "the young lady," she sees her education as useless and is focused on marrying a wealthy gentleman with a large estate.

[15] Vovchok's first volume of folk stories was published by the already established fellow Ukrainian author and literary critic P. Kulish.

[11] Taras Shevchenko praised her for her depictions of Ukrainian serfdom, dedicating one of his poems to her and calling her a "prophet".

[11][16] Vovchok's own story, "Instytutka," which she wrote in 1859, was dedicated to Shevchenko and contained some of her most powerful anti-serfdom sentiment.

Ivan Turgenev, one of the most popular and influential writers in Russia at the time praised her work for its content and writing style.

[11][12] Many critics praised Vovchok's truthful and realistic depiction of serfs and peasants, as well as the critiques she leveled against landlords and the landed gentry.

Some critics thought that she was putting too much emphasis on the dark tones of her stories and that she was deliberately attempting to sway to audience into a particular view about serfdom.

[11] Turgenev shared the Russian translation of her stories in Europe to other writers, such as Alexander Herzen, who expressed interest in Vovchok and her work.