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...