Winifred Marshall Gales was a novelist, memoirist, and poet who supported the British reform movement of the late eighteenth century and worked to bring civil libertarianism to her adoptive home of North Carolina. Exiled from England, she and her husband, printer Joseph Gales, spent their most productive years in the capital city of Raleigh, where they were staunch supporters of the American Unitarian movement and prominent members of Raleigh intellectual circles. Gales's best known work, Matilda Berkely, or, Family Anecdotes (1804), was the first locally published novel by a resident of the state of North Carolina.

Winifred Marshall was born on 10 July 1761 in Newark, England, the youngest daughter of John and Elizabeth Weston Marshall. Both her parents came from families that were respectable though not wealthy, and Winifred was distantly related to English aristocracy. At her father's insistence she received an education in both the classics and the political...