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Margaret Deland

MARGARETTA WADE CAMPBELL was born at Allegheny, Pennsylvania, February 23, 1857. When only sixteen she went to New York to study drawing and design and later taught them. In 1880 she married Lorin Deland, famous as sometime football strategist against the enemies of Harvard.

In 1886 appeared "The Old Garden," a collection of verse. It is a characteristic title; for many years Mrs. Deland has each winter grown in her own house in Boston great numbers of Dutch bulbs, which she sells at an annual function to her friends and the public, for the benefit of her favorite charities. As she does all the labor herself, it is a singularly personal form of good works.

Only two years later came "John Ward, Preacher," a book which won the author wide recognition. There have been many others besides "The Awakening of Helena Richie" including "Doctor Lavendar's People," "Old Chester Tales," "The Iron Woman," "The Kays," and "The Rising Tide."

The people in Mrs. Deland's books are not mere pegs on which to hang the incidents of a story; they are real human beings engaged with the problems of life as it comes to them--as real as the woman who plies her boat with the red sail of a summer's day at Kennebunk port, of whom the natives say, "There goes Margaret Deland!"