Margaret Peterson

Margaret Peterson (1883 – 1933) was an English novelist.

Biography

Margaret Peterson grew up in Bombay (Mumbai), the youngest child of Peter and Agnes (née Christall) Peterson. Her parents were originally from Scotland but relocated in 1873 to Bombay, where her father, a Sanskritist, took a professorship at Elphinstone College.

In 1910 Margaret Peterson relocated to London, where she lived on 25 shillings a week in a girls’ hostel. She initially supported herself with odd jobs—dog-walker, waitress, nanny—before deciding to become a writer. She went door-to-door with her autobiographical first manuscript, Youth at the Helm, pitching it to different publishers with little success. She then met the publisher Andrew Melrose, who declined her manuscript but encouraged her to keep writing. Her next work, Lure of the Little Drum, he accepted for publication and awarded her the firm’s writing prize, a 250-guinea cash award for best first novel.

This success precipitated a prolific career as a novelist, poet, and journalist. Her extensive output was the result of her unsentimental attitude toward writing. A short biographical article, published in the June 1926 issue of The Bookman, recounts Peterson’s resolve "never to shirk work, or to wait for inspirations that do not come, but simply to sit down to it for so many hours a day and write something."

Peterson married in 1915 to A. O. [Albert Oliver] Fisher, who served in the Honourable Artillery during the First World War. According to The Bookman article, he was seriously injured in Ypres, Belgium, and a convalescence of two years followed. Once he recovered, he accepted a position as a colonial civil servant in Uganda, where he and Peterson—who continued to write under her maiden name and the pseudonym, Glint Green—relocated. Both Uganda and India feature in a number of Peterson’s novels.