The first Canadian author to sell more than a million copies of a book was a woman who disguised her gender by calling herself Marshall Saunders. Her real name was Margaret, but she used the name Marshall because she believed there was more acceptance of stories written by men. She also based most of her stories in the United States though the setting of her best-selling novel, based on a true story about a mistreated dog named Beautiful Joe, was Meaford, then a village on the historic shores of Georgian Bay, Ontario.

To mark the 100th anniversary of its original publication, volunteers, in conjunction with the Meadford Town Council, Chamber of Commerce, and Rotary Club, republished the original story in 1994, made “Beautiful Joe” a town symbol, and dedicated a park adjacent to a pink frame house that had become the dog’s home following his rescue from a cruel, disgusting owner who had cut off his ears and tail.

Margaret Saunders wrote nine other children’s books featuring animals, and, although all were successful, none matched the popularity of Beautiful Joe, the first American edition of which sold out in ten days. By 1900 sales in the United States totalled 650,000; in Canada, 558,000, and in Britain, 146,000. Eventually, the story was translated into 18 languages.

Saunders’ nine other books are described as “adult romances” and “social problem fiction” by Elizabeth Waterston whose brief biography in 1992 reveals that Saunders’ commitment was not to animal causes only but to such other issues as the abolition of child labour, slum clearance, better playgrounds, and greater recognition of the role of women in society.

The second of six children born to a Baptist minister in Nova Scotia and a mother whose family were successful West Indies traders, Margaret lived in the Annapolis Valley until she was six, then moved to Halifax in 1867. At age 15 she was sent to a boarding school in Scotland for further studies in conversational French and German as well as history and literature.

There her diaries and letters home showed no particular aptitude for writing but did reflect her loneliness. “I cry all the time,” she wrote to her mother, “when it does not interfere with my lessons.” She also studied in France before returning home at age 17. Over the next eight years she took some courses at Dalhousie University, taught school, became involved in numerous causes – at one point she belonged to 20 organizations – and helped around the house. She also “scribbled” and, when one of her short stories won a contest that paid $40, this stimulated a lifetime interest in writing.
 

Taken circa 1925 at Canadian Keswick, Lake Rosseau, Muskoka, Ontario, this photograph assembles four well-known Canadian authors at the peak of their careers: left to right, Sir Charles G. Roberts (1860-1943); Margaret Marshall Saunders (1861-1947); Wilson Pugsley Macdonald (1880-1967); and John M.Elson (1880-1966).

Her first novel, a romance called A Spanish Sailor, was published in Britain in 1889. She submitted short stories to various magazines before learning through her brother’s fiancée in Meaford about a dog that had been rescued from a cruel owner. Brought up in a home that housed numerous pets and aware that the American Humane Society (AHS) was offering a $200 prize for a novel that could repeat the success of Black Beauty, Margaret wrote Beautiful Joe and won the prize.

Her father, who gave up the ministry to become editor of a religious magazine and write tomes on such topics as the history of the Baptist Church in the Maritimes, suggested she retain the rights rather than turn them over to the AHS. Beautiful Joe was subsequently pub-lished with revised editions made to meet the needs of American and British readers (Canadian and British editions, for example, were endorsed by Lady Aberdeen, wife of the Canadian Governor General, while the U.S. edition had a letter written by the editor of the popular children’s magazine called Youth’s Companion which had published many of her short stories).

Written as an autobiography, Beautiful Joe illustrates not only that animals are cruel one to the other but also that many ordinary people can be malicious, evil, merciless, and self-destructive. Beautiful Joe’s heroine is Laura whom he admires for trying to improve the world in ways that include stopping drunkards from their folly to adding mercy to the justice meted out to criminals.

After Beautiful Joe’s enormous success, a number of short stories previously written by Saunders and published in Sunday magazines were produced in book form in 1896 under the title For Other Boys’ Sake. Margaret by then was spending much of her time in Boston, attending Boston University and writing at least two novels, both published in 1897. She returned to Canada to spend five months among the Acadians to research her 1898 novel, Rose à Charlitte, and for the next five years her Boston publisher brought out a Saunders novel annually, the most popular of them in 1902 when she wrote Beautiful Joe’s Paradise.

This sequel, prompted in part because the real “Joe” had died, explored the immortality of pets. Despite the topic, “which might make us expect ... a sad and sentimental book,” Waterston writes that it was “lively, funny, and filled with inventiveness.”

In 1908 Margaret suffered a breakdown. After rest in a home in Maine, however, she produced two more works in 1910, one of them her powerful work on how women might effectively confront social problems.

A year later, she was awarded an honorary degree by Acadia University and following the death of her mother in 1913, she and a sister with their father, then in his 80s, moved to Toronto where she published another autobiographical animal story, Pussy Black Face.
 

Published in 1894, Beautiful Joe became the first book written by a Canadian author to sell more than a million copies!

A further autobiographical dog story followed: Boy: The Wandering Dog. Set in New York City, it humorously describes the city as a bad place for dogs because of high licence fees, laws requiring muzzles, and rich owners giving “too many baths.” But it also attacks fur merchants by describing “women walking about dressed in fur coats, thanks to the cruel seal traffic.”

A revised edition of Beautiful Joe was published in 1918 by the Canadian firm then known as McClelland, Goodchild and Stewart. In 1919, Saunders published Golden Dicky: The Story of a Canary which Lucy Maud Montgomery described as so suspenseful when she read it to her son that “she had to read the ending to reassure him.” On meeting Saunders, however, the author of Anne of Green Gables found Saunders “a clever woman but a bit of a bore – talks too much and overloads her conversation with irrelevant details.”

Other animal stories followed: one about a pony, another about a monkey. In her final novel, Esther de Warren, she recalls her own experiences 50 years earlier. The heroine in this work is a Nova Scotia girl of 15 on board ship sailing to Edinburgh. While some critics find it a puzzling story with aspects of fantasy and fairy tale qualities, Saunders wrote to Lorne Pierce that “Esther is my favourite book.”

When her writing career ended in 1927, Saunders carried on, giving lectures and illustrated talks to literary clubs and other groups. She also remained active in numerous clubs and societies. In 1934, the same year another edition of Beautiful Joe was published, she was awarded a Companion of the British Empire (CBE). In her 70s, she began suffering from bouts of mental confusion that, as a niece wrote, continued with greater “estrangement from reality” until her death at age 86 in 1947.
Mel James