This thesis contributes to on-going research in Canadian letters to recuperate the works of "forgotten" women writers through an account of the life and works of Madge Hamilton Lyons Macbeth (1878-1965) in the contexts of her own day, derived in part from original archival research. The thesis utilizes cultural materialist and feminist frameworks as its primary tools for analyzing the ways in which notions of nationhood, protocols of genre, academic institutionalization and canon formation, as well as such designations as "popular" have created an infrastructure which places "virile" (masculine) writing at its core. Thus, before women writers of the early twentieth-century committed pen to paper, their work was, ipso facto relegated to literary sub-categories. The thesis argues that the career of Madge Macbeth is emblematic of such constructions/constrictions.