Margaret Fairley

Margaret Adele Keeling Fairley (1885 – 1968) was a Canadian writer, educator, and political activist.

She was born in Bradford, Yorkshire, UK and died in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

At a time when the university did not grant degrees to women, she studied at Oxford and finished with a "first" in English. She became tutor in English at St. Hilda's College, and in 1912 was appointed advisor to women students at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. She held this position only for a year, before marrying Barker Fairley, a fellow Yorkshireman and professor of modern languages. The U of A granted her a bachelor of arts degree. After the birth of Joan (Hall) and Tom, the family moved to Toronto where they had Elizabeth, William and Ann (Schabas) where she lived until her death 1968.

She moved in the same intellectual circles as historian Stanley Ryerson and poet Dorothy Livesay.

In 1949, while attending the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York, she was deported from the United States.

Writing
Her first book was an edition of poems (Coleridge Poems, 1794-1807, published in 1910). It includes a 49-page biographical essay introducing Coleridge "as a Poet of Nature and Romance." She was editor of New Frontiers, a journal published by the Labour-Progressive Party of Canada, and two other books:
 * The Spirit of Canadian Democracy (1945)
 * Selected Writings of William Lyon Mackenzie (1960)

Recognition
On June 23, 1972, the City of Toronto named a park after her at the corner of Brunswick Avenue and Ulster Street. The City provided a plaque with her name on a granite boulder. A bit later, family and friends raised the money to erect a bronze bust.

Some of her manuscripts are in the collection of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto.