Madge (Hamilton) Macbeth Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on Madge (Hamilton) Macbeth

Well known as an Ottawa literary personality and the first woman president of the Canadian Authors' Association, Madge Hamilton Lyons Macbeth was born in Philadelphia, 6 November 1880, the elder daughter of Bessie Maffit and Hymen Hart Lyons, the latter of pioneer Jewish-American descent. Because of her father's illness the family moved to Asheville, North Carolina, and after his death in 1888 they lived in various locations in Maryland. A precocious child, Macbeth attempted to revise the Bible at the age of three, wrote and staged neighborhood plays, and ran juvenile newspapers, including the school paper at Hellmuth College in London, Ontario, where she was sent in her early teens. This Victorian finishing school, which educated her to drink tea and mingle with the Upper-Canadian social elite, ill-prepared her for the later realities of household management and widowhood. After returning to Maryland for a brief career on the musical stage as a mandolinist from 1899 to 1901 (a phase of her life omitted from her memoirs but preserved in her scrapbooks), she married Charles William Macbeth, a Canadian civil engineer, in Baltimore on 26 October 1901. They first lived in Detroit then moved to Ottawa about 1904. Several years later Charles Macbeth died of tuberculosis, leaving his wife to support two small sons, John Douglas and Charles Lyons.

Macbeth chose writing as an occupation that would allow her to remain with her children. After a discouraging year "when stories came back like homing pigeons" (as she says in Boulevard Career, 1957), she established herself in fiction with the sale of two stories,"The Changeling," for sixty dollars, to Canada West and"Frieda's Engagement,"for five dollars, to the Canadian Magazine; she also became known in the field of journalism for her free-lance interviews of Members of Parliament, a tactic suggested by Marjorie MacMurchy (Lady Willison), a journalist and minor author. To generate sufficient income, Macbeth said she wrote "everything but hymns" (Ottawa Citizen, 23 March 1964) and often submitted her work pseudonymously to avoid saturating the small Canadian magazine market.

Her first novel, The Winning Game (1910), is a sensational account of a woman's ruses to reform her alcoholic husband. Kleath (1917), set in the Yukon, promised greater financial reward when the film rights were sold, the author's share being $442. However, the resulting silent movie was given the title The Law of the Yukon, taken from Robert Service's famous poem, and Macbeth received no credit or royalties. Most of her later fiction, like her initial books, bears evidence of its composition for immediate sale, yet Macbeth did not hesitate to tackle pertinent political and social issues. The forest-ranger heroine of The Patterson Limit (1923) argues for the right of women to perform traditionally male occupations. When told that "Fire-ranging is a man's job," she retorts, "So was acting, and doctoring, and legislating, and ambulance driving, and traffic regulating, and flying ... yet women have proved their capabilities in all these spheres once they were given a chance!" Shackles (1926) anticipates Alice Munro's story"The Office" in its account of a woman writer's attempt to assert her independence and the validity of her work, as well as Margaret Laurence's The Fire-Dwellers in its depiction of women's struggles to balance inexorable family demands against personal needs.

The Land of Afternoon: A Satire (1924) and The Kinder Bees (1935), the two satirical novels Macbeth published as Gilbert Knox, aroused considerable attention and might have elevated her reputation had she been willing to acknowledge them publicly. The first is a devastating satire of Ottawa social climbing and political intrigue, described by Arthur Stringer in a contemporary review as "a gallery of portraits etched in acid." Fresh from Pinto Plains, newly elected M.P. Raymond Dilling, the protagonist, is quickly initiated into and nearly victimized by his party's back-room power struggles, just as his wife is unwittingly drawn into parallel social schemes. While the Dillings escape with their integrity intact, Ottawa does not. The target of The Kinder Bees is moral and social hypocrisy in governing circles; along with Shackles, Macbeth's Ottawa satires contain a degree of sexual realism rare in Canadian fiction of this era.

Macbeth's childhood interest in theater was rekindled in Ottawa. One of the founding organizers of the Ottawa Little Theatre, she continued to write, direct, and act in amateur productions throughout her life. In the 1920s she adapted her theatrical flair to put on business dramas, fashion shows, and educational dramatic classes. National and foreign travel added more grist to her mill as a free-lance journalist and lecturer. In 1923 she undertook a cross-Canada lecture tour to publicize the "bungalow camps" run by the Canadian Pacific Railroad; other travels took her to Paris and Spain, and later to South America (1936), Palestine (1938), and prewar Europe. She was also a founding member of the Canadian Authors' Association. After heading the Ottawa branch she was elected national president in 1939, 1940, and 1941, achieving a double record as the group's first woman and only three-term president. Reflections on her career and engaging personal glimpses into the past of Ottawa and the Canadian literary establishment are to be found in Macbeth's two books of memoirs, Over My Shoulder (1953) and Boulevard Career.