Margaret Marshall Saunders

Margaret Marshall was born in Milton, Nova Scotia in 1861, the second child in a family of six. Her novels successfully catch some of the real turbulence of a remembered childhood, a turbulence that came partly from her passionate commitment to causes. Animal rights inflamed her imagination when she wrote Beautiful Joe. In her books about city children she reveals other commitments - to abolition of child labour, to slum clearance, to enlargement of playground facilities, to vegetarianism. She died in 1947 at the age of eighty-six.