After Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Ida May was one of the best-known and best-selling antislavery novels.  Its author was Mary Hayden Green Pike (1824-1898), a novelist from Eastport, Maine, who used the pseudonym Mary Langdon for this novel.  She notes in the novel’s preface that descriptions of Southern society were based on a period of residence in the South, but very little is known of Pike’s life. There have been no identifiable substantive treatments of Pike’s writing and only rare critical references to Ida May.   See Andrea K. Newlyn, “Undergoing Racial ‘Reassignment’: The Politics of Transraacial Crossing in Sinclair Lewis’s Kingsblood Royal,” Modern Fiction Studies 48 (2002) 4:1041-1074, at 1053; and David Levy, “Racial Stereotypes in Antislavery Fiction,” Phylon 31 (1970) 3:265-279, at 267.

Mary Pike subsequently published two further novels, Caste, A Story of Republican Equality (1856, under the pseudonym Sidney A. Story, Jr.) and Agnes (1858).  The former dealt with racial prejudices in the North; the latter was a romance novel of a woman betrayed, set during the Revolutionary War.  These were less successful than Ida May.

- Joe Lockard