During the second half of the nineteenth century, Agnes Maule Machar (occasionally writing as Fidelis) was an important literary and reformist figure in Victorian Canada. Described in 1892 as "our most gifted authoress," Machar wrote more than half a dozen novels, some poetry, and several volumes of history and biography. She was a leading contributor to the country's major cultural periodicals, with more than sixty-five pieces of prose and poetry published in the Canadian Monthly and its successor, Rose-Belford's Canadian Monthly, and more than one hundred items in the Week. She was an outstanding crusader for the causes of temperance, labor, reform, feminism, and in the defense of Christianity.

Born in Kingston, Ontario, where she remained for her entire life, she inherited her social and religious concerns from her Scottish Presbyterian parents. Her mother was Margaret Maule Machar, and her father, John Machar, was minister of the church attended...