Travel, fiction and religious doubt
Maitland was born at Ipswich in 1824 and grew up in the strict evangelical household of his father, the clergyman Charles David Maitland. He studied at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, graduating in 1847. Although his family intended him for the Church, doubts about its doctrines and his own vocation prevented him from taking orders.
He left England and joined the Californian gold rush in 1849, later travelling to Australia. In New South Wales he became a commissioner of crown lands and police magistrate. He married Esther Bradley in 1855, but she died the following year, leaving an infant son, Charles. Maitland returned to England in the late 1850s and turned increasingly to literature.
His novels joined accounts of experience with arguments about belief and society. The Pilgrim and the Shrine drew on his travels and religious search; The Higher Law continued his questioning of convention. By and By, published in 1873, imagined a future society and explored technological and social possibilities. Journalism and reviewing connected him with the literary world before his collaboration with Anna Kingsford became the centre of his work.
Collaboration with Anna Kingsford
Maitland met Kingsford in 1874 after she had taken an interest in his writing. He accompanied her to Paris during her medical studies and supported her campaigns against vivisection and the consumption of animal flesh. Their work sought an inward interpretation of religious symbols, with spiritual regeneration taking the place of a merely external or literal understanding of Christian doctrines.
