Madge Hamilton MacBeth was a pioneer
Madge Macbeth (nee Madge Hamilton Lyons) was a Canadian pioneer in the literary field defending women's rights and tackling pertinent political and social issues.
She was a prolific writer authoring countless articles and short stories, two serialized novels, two memoirs, radio and stage drama, and twenty novels. Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Madge exhibited literary tendencies as young as at the age of three, when she attempted to revise the Bible, in addition to writing and producing neighbourhood plays in her home town later on.
After losing her father to tuberculosis in 1888, Madge moved with her family to various locations in Maryland. Interested in journalism, she created and ran juvenile newspapers, including the already-established school paper at Helmuth College in London, Ontario, the girls' school she attended beginning in her early teens.
After graduation, she was briefly employed as a touring mandolinist from 1899 until her 1901 marriage, age 20, to civil engineer Charles William Macbeth, with whom she lived in Detroit for two years and Ottawa where she would stay for the rest of her long life. Widowed after Charles lost his battle with tuberculosis in1908, Madge had to support her two sons. So that she could still attend to her children, she turned to writing as a career.
Her first year, she was unable to sell any of her stories or articles. Instead, she baked cakes and sold them herself. After about a year, however, her writings began to appear in print, publishing her first two stories in Canada West and the Canadian Magazine. She would become a highly-regarded journalist, novelist and playwright, who, for more than a half-century, would greatly contribute to Canada’s literary activities. Her literary talents were perhaps inherited from her grandmother, one of the first American women to become a professional author.
In 1910, she published her first novel, The Winning Game. As a writer who circulated in the American and Canadian upper classes and friend to members of Parliament, prime ministers and governors-general, she fictionalized the politics of her class in The Land of Afternoon (1924) and The Kinder Bees (1935). Macbeth also wrote articles on diplomats, princesses, and debutantes for the Canadian Courier and Mayfair magazines.
world view combined the assertiveness of the New Woman with the tradition of maternal feminism. Macbeth moved between the private and public spheres – travelling around the world, supporting her family by writing, volunteering in several Canadian cultural organizations. A founding member of the Canadian Authors Association and its first female president, she was also actively involved in the Canadian Women’s Press Club.
Her childhood interest in theatre was rekindled in Ottawa and she later became one of the founding organizers of the Ottawa Little Theatre. Her extensive travels to such exotic locations as Paris, Spain, South America, Yugoslavia and Palestine provided subject matter for much of her writing, and her interest in the literary and art worlds produced articles which introduced readers to persons destined to fame such as Yousuf Karsh.
Most of her work was published in Canada, by Maclean’s Magazine, Chatelaine, Canadian Home and Garden, Dalhousie Review, Canadian Home Journal and the Canadian Geographical Journal. Saturday Night printed 42 of her articles between 1912 and 1937.
She also wrote books and newspaper articles, and in the 1950s she had a regular column in the Ottawa Citizen titled ‘Over My Shoulder.’ In total, Macbeth published more than 20 books, the last one coming out in 1965, the year of her death. An early book, Kleath, was printed in 1917 and was later, without her permission, made into a movie. In the early days of civilian aviation she made her first flight, resulting in a 1924 Saturday Night article, as a well as a book Wings in the West, written with Colonel (later, General) E.L.M. Burns. Several of her novels dealt with politics in a satirical manner, a possible reason for pseudonyms on some of her writings.
Her fifth novel, Shackles, first published in 1926 under the name Gilbert Knox, is a pivotal work of early twentieth-century Canadian literature, recounting a vibrant period of first-wave feminism in Canada. Macbeth’s association with the Ottawa Drama League probably started an important part of her writing, that of playwright. She wrote for both the stage and for radio drama broadcasts, the latter in the 1920s when the newly-formed Canadian National railway opened ten radio broadcasting studios in its hotels across Canada.
The broadcasts, heard locally by those with a radio receiver, were also heard by CNR train travelers who were provided with ear phones. Macbeth not only wrote drama broadcasts from the CNR's Ottawa studio located at the Chateau Laurier, she was also a part of the cast. When the CNR ceased its broadcasting activities in 1932, Macbeth became a strong advocate for the establishment of a national Canadian broadcaster that, one day, would see the light as the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
When Madge Macbeth died in 1965 she was buried in Beechwood’s Section 19 next to her son John Douglas Macbeth who died in 1951.
He had been a WWII Canadian army officer who served in Italy and France, afterwards becoming executive assistant to ministers of the Department of Veterans Affairs. John D. Macbeth also authored Somewhere in England: War Letters of a Canadian Officer on Overseas Service (1941).