Holmes, Mary Jane: Bad Hugh. V1. 28 June 2010
 

Mary Jane Holmes (April 5, 1825 – October 6, 1907) was an American author who wrote many popular novels.
Mary Jane Hawes was born in Brookfield, Massachusetts in 1825. At age 13 she taught in a school. She married Daniel Holmes and they settled in Versailles, Kentucky. In 1854 she wrote her first novel, Tempest and Sunshine. The theme for most of her novels was domestic life. She died in 1907, at the age of 82, in Brockport, New York.

A large, old-fashioned, weird-looking wooden building, with strangely shaped bay windows and stranger gables projecting here and there from the slanting roof, where the green moss clung in patches to the moldy shingles, or formed a groundwork for the nests the swallows built year after year beneath the decaying eaves. Long, winding piazzas, turning sharp, sudden angles, and low, square porches, where the summer sunshine held many a fantastic dance, and where the winter storm piled up its drifts of snow, whistling merrily as it worked, and shaking the loosened casement as it went whirling by.