Through the mouths of vivid characters, witty and moving dialogue, and poetically drawn landscapes and seascapes, acclaimed novelist Margaret Duley created a Newfoundland "set" upon which she explored existential and universal questions.

Skillfully interweaving history, including the devastating impact of World War One, the women's suffrage movement, the Depression, the loss of Newfoundland's self-government, and Confederation with Canada, this biography explores their influence upon Margaret Duley's life and writing. Within these pages, Duley comes alive, freed from flattened descriptions of her as a wealthy jeweller's daughter, and showing her maternal family's deep outport roots, her father's impoverished origins in England, and her parents’ rise in society. Duley's birth home in St. John's was one of comforts and evangelical causes prompting her lifelong search for a fairer society. Disillusioned with Christian institutions that had justified the Great War and entrapped women, Margaret Duley sought new answers in Theosophy and Asian religions. Duley's spiritual search is discussed as well as her feminism, anti-militarism, and her life at home and abroad.

Historian Margot I. Duley uses personal knowledge, novels, letters, and a wide array of sources to draw a lively portrait of a brilliant, complex, and courageous woman, and shines new light on Margaret Duley’s life and writing.

Margot I. Duley received a B.A.(Hons) from Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador, an M.A. from Duke University, and a Ph.D. in British Imperial and South Asian history from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She is Professor Emerita of History and Women's Studies, Eastern Michigan University, and Dean Emerita, College of Arts and Sciences, University of Springfield. Her interests include the history of women's movements, especially India, the United States and Newfoundland, and international women's alliances. She is co-editor and chief contributor to the Cross-Cultural Study of Women, and author of Where Once Our Mothers Stood We Stand: Women's Suffrage in Newfoundland 1890-1925, studies of Armine Gosling, the Newfoundland suffrage leader, Nurse Mona Loder, who served in France throughout World War

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