(1823-14 Feb. 1897), author. Born in Scotland. Parents: Rev. James Robertson (died 1861) and his wife Elizabeth Murray. After the death of his wife, James Robertson emigrated to Vermont. Margaret Murray Robertson accompanied the family to Vermont, and afterwards to Sherbrooke, Que., The Rev. James Robertson was a Congregationalist minister in Sherbrooke for 25 years. Margaret Murray Robertson attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, South Hadley, Mass., 1847-1848. On the basis of these dates, then, she must have been a fellow student there of Emily Dickinson. Thereafter Robertson taught at Sherbrooke Academy until she was in her early 40s, then seems to have given up teaching for a life of authorship. She was the author of “at least 14 novels.” (Dictionary of Canadian Biography). A reviewer in 1880 called her books “well-known, and, we might add, much-loved,” and said that they “have deeply touched the heart of many a domestic circle.” (Witness 13 Dec. 1880) Margaret Murray Robertson died in Montreal. She was unmarried. The death and funeral, we are told, “nearly passed unnoticed” (mentioned), but she did receive a eulogistic obituary in the Montreal Daily Witness. She belonged to an unusually talented family. Two of her brothers have lives in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, and another was starred in earlier volumes for appearance in that work but was later passed over. (mentioned, X, 620) One of these brothers, Joseph Gibb Robertson, was mayor of Sherbrooke and a member of the Quebec cabinet and a long-time provincial treasurer of Quebec. Her sister Mary (see Mary Gordon) was married to the Rev. Daniel Gordon, and through this marriage Margaret Murray Robertson was the aunt of the novelist “Ralph Connor” (Rev. Charles W. Gordon).

     Margaret Murray Robertson was the author of a remarkable novel about the Glengarrians, called (to use the title of the first edition) Shenac’s Work at Home. The novel was first published in Philadelphia by the American Sunday-School Union in 1866. It was reprinted by the Religious Tract Society of London, Eng., in 1868 and 1884, and by Thomas Nelson and Sons of London, Edinburgh and New York in 1889 and 1904, and by the Tecumseh Press of Ottawa in 1993. The title varies slightly over the editions. Copies are rare, and it is possible there were other, now forgotten editions. The novel is set in the same area of Glengarry as Ralph Connor’s Man from Glengarry and Glengarry School Days. The illustrations of the editions, if not valid representations of the GC scene, are striking for their record of 19th-century concepts of the Highlanders and of pioneer life. One of these was reproduced as a frontispiece in the Bibliography of Glengarry County of 1996. An earlier novel about pioneer Glengarry was written by the Rev. James Drummond, and Fr Jean-Baptiste Proulx touched lightly on Glengarry in his novel-like book of 1887 on Pierre Cholet. Margaret Murray Robertson seems to have lived very quietly in her own time, and after her death she was, to all appearance, largely forgotten both as an author and as a person. Even her nephew “Ralph Connor” said little about her in his autobiography except that she “became a novelist, well known in her day.” (Postscript to Adventure, 8) Beginning about the 1970s, however, she has come into notice again, and her reputation seems now well established as that of a remarkable early Canadian woman professional writer. She is the subject of a biographical sketch in Blain, Clements and Grundy’s The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present (Yale Univ. Press, and Batsford Ltd [UK], 1990).

Life of Margaret Murray Robertson by Lorraine McMullen in Dictionary of Canadian Biography Vol. XII (also life of her brother Andrew Robertson in Vol. X and of her brother Joseph Gibb Robertson immediately preceding hers in Vol. XII) * Morgan (1898) 868-870 for brothers Joseph Gibb and W.W. Robertson * anonymous obituary tribute (short essay), Montreal Daily Witness 20 Feb. 1897 (photocopy of clipping kindly supplied by Mount Holyoke College in 1973, when no full copy of that issue of the newspaper could be traced. One may wonder whether her nephew C.W. Gordon (“Ralph Connor”) was a contributor to this vigorous but somewhat overdone tribute. * brief obituary, Sherbrooke Daily Record 15 Feb. 1897 * J.D. Borthwick, History and Biographical Gazetteer of Montreal to the Year 1892 (1892) 139-140 (tribute) * Louis Dantin and John Hayes, Le mouvement littéraire dans les Cantons de l’Est (1930) 24 (“Marguerite M. Robertson”), brief notice but from a period when any notice of her was rare * Royce MacGillivray, “Novelists and the Glengarry Pioneer,” Ontario History (June 1973) * MacGillivray & Ross 79-94, 110, 665, 685 (includes discussion of the relationship of Shenac to other GC novels) * Lorraine McMullen, “Margaret Murray Robertson: Domestic Power,” in Carrie MacMillan, Lorraine McMullen and Elizabeth Waterston, Silenced Sextet: Six Nineteenth Century Canadian Women Novelists (1992) * Bibliography of Glengarry 11, 174 * Claire Buck, The Bloomsbury Guide to Women’s Literature (1992) 964 * list of her novels: Watters 378-379