author
Mary L. Day
b. 1836
Best known for the memoir Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl, this 19th-century American writer told her own story with unusual directness and warmth. Her books offer a personal view of education, disability, and everyday life in an era that rarely preserved such voices.
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About the author
Born in 1836, Mary L. Day was an American writer remembered for two memoirs: Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl (1859) and its sequel, The World as I Have Found It (1878). She studied at the Maryland Institution for the Blind, and her writing drew on her own life and experiences.
Her work stands out because it presents blindness not as an abstract subject, but as part of a full human story shaped by family, schooling, work, and social expectations. That firsthand perspective has helped keep her books of interest to readers of memoir, disability history, and 19th-century American literature.
Available sources indicate that she was born in 1836 and was still living after 1883. Even though relatively little is widely recorded about her life today, her memoirs remain an important record of a voice that might otherwise have been lost.