Poets

Isabel Ecclestone MacKay is one of a group of Canadian literary women whose phenomenal output and active public lives are a testimony to the considerable energy that characterized the early twentieth-century female literary community. Although she was a prolific poet, novelist, playwright, and newspaperwoman, MacKay will be remembered best as a tireless champion of creative writing and journalism in Canada. She founded the British Columbia chapter of the Canadian Women's Press Club, serving as vice president in 1914 and president in 1916. She was also vice president of the Vancouver branch of the Canadian Authors' Association from 1922 to 1926. Her reports on the activities of the Vancouver C.A.A. are valuable sources of information about this important Canadian literary organization.

She was born Isabel Ecclestone Macpherson on 25 November 1875 in Woodstock, Ontario, was educated at the Woodstock Collegiate Institute, and began her literary career at the age of fifteen. From 1890 to 1900, writing under the pseudonym "Heather," she was staff contributor to the Woodstock Daily Express and, in 1894, began contributing poems and short stories to other Canadian newspapers as well. She married court reporter Peter John MacKay in 1895, and in 1909 the couple moved to Vancouver, where for a year she edited the social column for the Canadian Courier . Between 1894 and 1928 she published six novels, four collections of poems, and five plays, and contributed over three hundred poem..