Famous Canadian Author from Newfoundland/Labrador

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Newfoundland/Labrador

Margaret Iris Duley was born on September 27, 1894, in St. John’s, in the colony of Newfoundland (Newfoundland didn’t become a province of Canada until 1949). Her father, Thomas Duley, had emigrated from Birmingham, England, while her mother, Tryphena Soper was born in Carbonear, NFL. Margaret graduated from the Methodist College in St. John’s in 1910 and in 1911 she and her family went to England for a relative’s wedding. She decided to stay and study drama and elocution (distinct pronunciation and articulation of speech) at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. Unfortunately, she had to return home when WWI broke out in Europe.

     Duley worked at the Women’s Patriotic Association to raise money and supplies for the Royal Newfoundland Regiment. Her older brother was injured during the war and her younger brother was killed.

     Duley’s father died in 1920 and left her an income of $250 a year. This allowed her some freedom and she joined the Ladies Reading Room and the Current Events Club. This club produced many leaders of the Newfoundland women’s suffrage movement. She was also a supporter of the Women’s Franchise League who petitioned island-wide for women to vote. The Newfoundland government passed a suffrage bill in March 1925, allowing women to vote at age 25, men at 21. In the 1928 general election, 90 per cent of women eligible to vote cast a ballot.

     In 1928, during a boat trip to the Labrador coast with her brother, a seagull with eyes like yellow ice hovered in front of Margaret. She used this fierce, yellow-eyed image in her first book titled, The Eyes of the Gull. It is the story of a thirty-year-old woman who wants to escape her outport life and leave an overpowering mother.

     Margaret’s second novel, Cold Pastoral, was published in 1939. It is about an orphaned young girl who is adopted into a wealthy family in St. John’s and is loosely based on a real case of a child lost in the woods.

     During WWII Margaret worked for the Women’s Patriotic Association and the St. John’s Ambulance. Later she because the Public Relations Officer for the Red Cross and started writing newspaper articles. In her third novel, Highway to Valour (1941), Margaret used the 1929 tidal wave that struck the Burin Peninsula as a backdrop for the life of the young heroine. Her fourth book Novelty on Earth was published in 1942 and the Caribou Hut (1949) was based on her volunteer work at the Caribou Hut, a hostel for returning servicemen. All her novels had a strong female characters.

     During this time she also did interviews and broadcast talks on CJON, a local radio station. The station sent her to England in 1952 to transmit stories on the coronation of Queen Elizabeth.

Margaret developed Parkinson’s disease and her health started to decline in 1955. She was unable to hold a pen by 1959 and moved in with her sister-in-law. She lived with her until her death on March 22, 1968, at the age of seventy-three.

     Margaret Iris Duley is considered Newfoundland’s first novelist (female or male) and was the first Newfoundland writer to gain an international audience. She was loved in England and the United States for her novels, yet belittled at home for her outspoken views on women’s rights and her novels’ bold portrayal of the female perspective. Her niece, author Margot Duley, described her as a free thinking, free spirited, outspoken and charismatic personality in a society where this was not encouraged.

     A Parks Canada historic plaque dedicated to Margaret Iris Duley is attached to the Education Building on the campus of the Memorial University in St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador. Her home at 51 Rennies Mill Road is part of a Women’s History Walking Tour of St. John’s. She was designated a National Historic Person by Parks Canada in September, 2007.