Some Thoughts on Maria Proctor Collins

Maria Proctor was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, probably about 1763, though her actual birth date is unknown. She married David Collins in late 1777 in St. Paul's Church, Halifax.. I suspect she was probably about 14 at the time of her marriage, mostly because of an extraordinarily difficult childbirth in England a year or so later. The child did not survive and Maria's health was wrecked for the rest of her life. Henceforth she aged swiftly and became a semi-invalid, suffering from severe chest comp;aints and eventually, epilepsy.

From all accounts she was a very lively young girl with a deep interest in literature. This interest in writing was one of the reasons, apart from the physical, she found the dashing young David Collins attractive. Another was a deep distaste for colonial life. Collins was a way away from Halifax, and Halifax was indeed a place to be away from. Throughout her childhood and young adulthood she had known little else than rumours of rebellion from the thirteen colonies to the south, then, after April 1775, fears of invasion and the threat of actual rebellion in 1777 from a small clique of Nova Scotia Yankees. Though Collins was not involved in putting down this revolt on the Chibucto Peninsula north of Halifax, some of his comrades almost certainly were.

Maria Collins brought practically nothing as a marriage settlement to her union with Collins. It is clear from all her letters to him over the years that he was indeed the great love of her life. She deeply resented his time away from her, at the siege of Gibraltar in 1782, and later, during the years that he spent in New South Wales as Judge-Advocate. Though she never came to Sydney, or for that matter, later Van Diemen's Land where Collins was Lieutenant Governor,, she hated the convict colony with a passion. In the first place she thought it was disastrous for Collins's career advancement; and it is likely she felt some resentment at Collins's relationship with the convict woman Ann Yeats who bore him two children and was thereby a taunt to Maria's own childlessness.

Separated from her husband she fashioned a career for herself as a novelist. No copies of the novels survive (the family collection was destroyed in World War II) and if she used a nom-de-plume we do not know it.) All indications are that she was very skilled at her craft and wise in the ways of publishers. It is possible she helped David Collins write his An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales. She certainly edited a later shorter edition which Collins's biographer, John Currey, noted was of a superior literary standard to the first.

Maria Collins had come from a well-to-do colonial family. Her father, Charles Proctor, was, among other things a successful shipping merchant, though his business suffered in the economic fluctuations emanating from the revolutionary fervour to the south and it collapsed shortly before his death in 1774. To keep her in the manner to which she had been accustomed since birth, David Collins borrowed heavily, ultimately a disastrous course of action, as he was a hopeless financial manager in the first place. At his death in 1810, Maria was plunged into penury, that even a government pension granted a few years later did not entirely relieve. She died blind and with few possessions near Plymouth in 1830.