Mary Esther Miller MacGregor, who wrote all her fiction under the pseudonym Marian Keith, was born (probably) on 27 August 1874 in the small town of Rugby in the Ontario township of Oro, which would become the setting for many of her early novels. Her father was John Miller, an Ontario-born schoolteacher of Scots ancestry, and her mother was Mary McIan Miller, born in Islay, Scotland. The youngest of five children, Esther (as she was known) was educated at the Collegiate Institute in Orillia and then followed her father into the profession of teaching, graduating from the Toronto Normal School in 1896.

While a teacher at the Central Public School in Orillia from 1899 to 1906, she published Duncan Polite, the Watchman of Glenoro, which appeared serially in the Westminster magazine from April 1904 to January 1905 before coming out as a book later in 1905. With the subsequent serial publication of The Silver Maple (1906) and...