BROOKS, MARIA GOWEN

born 1794?, Medford, Mass., U.S. died Nov. 11, 1845, Matanzas, Cuba original name Abigail Gowen, married name (in full) Mary Abigail Gowen Brooks, byname Maria del Occidente American poet whose work, though admired for a time, represented a florid and grandiose style not greatly appreciated since. Abigail Gowen grew up in a prosperous and cultured family. After the death of her father in 1809, she came under the guardianship of John Brooks, a Boston merchant and the widower of her elder sister Lucretia. In 1810 she married Brooks, who was more than 30 years her senior. Financial reverses led to their removal from Boston to Portland (then Massachusetts, now Maine), where she found life unsatisfactory. In 1819 she legally changed her given name to Mary Abigail; she later gradually adopted the name Maria. In retreat partly from provincial Portland and partly from an infatuation with a young Canadian officer, she turned to poetry, and in 1820 she published anonymously a small volume called Judith, Esther, and Other Poems. After the death of her husband in 1823, she went to live with a brother on a coffee plantation near Matanzas, Cuba. A short time later she went to Canada, where she became engaged to and then estranged from the officer and twice attempted suicide. On regaining her health she returned to the Cuban plantation, which she had inherited, and began work on a verse romance, Zphil; or, The Bride of Seven, based on a tale in the apocryphal Book of Tobit. She published the first canto of the poem in Boston in 1825 under the name Mrs. Brooks and completed the work in 1829. In 1826 she began a correspondence with the English poet Robert Southey. In 1831 Brooks was in England and spent several weeks as Southey's guest. He undertook to supervise the publication in London of Zphil, which appeared in 1833 under the name Maria del Occidente. By that time she had returned to the United States, and in 1834 she published a private edition of Zphil in Boston. In 1838 she published serially in Boston's Saturday Evening Gazette a curious fictionalized autobiography entitled Idomen: or, The Vale of Yumuri. No commercial publisher would issue the work as a book, so in 1843 she issued a private edition in New York. In December 1843 she returned hurriedly to Cuba, where her eldest son and a stepson had died. She also died in Cuba, leaving unfinished a verse romance on Beatriz, the Beloved of Columbus.