Isabella MacDonald Alden was an American author, mainly of children’s literature and religious books. She was an editor of the Presbyterian Primary Quarterly and her own Christian magazine for children, Pansy.
Background
Isabella MacDonald was born on November 3, 1841, in Rochester, New York. She was a daughter of Isaac and Myra Spafford MacDonald.
The youngest of six children, Isabella MacDonald received her nickname, “Pansy,” from her father, Isaac MacDonald. Active in promoting social reforms, he conducted her earliest education and most of all, encouraged her to write: a journal, stories, and reports on sermons. It is not surprising that she published her first story at age ten, in a local Gloversville, New York, newspaper.
Education
Isabella MacDonald attended school at Seneca Collegiate Institute at Ovid, New York, and then the Young Ladies Institute, at Auburn, also in New York.
Career
At the Young Ladies Institute, Isabella worked as a student teacher, and her interest in pedagogy continued throughout her life. There she also wrote her first book, in response to a contest held by the American Reform Tract and Book Society for the best book making clear the path of salvation to children of ten to fourteen.
She hid the story in a trunk when she finished, considering it a failure, but her boarding school roommate secretly sent it in to the contest just days before the deadline. The book not only won the contest, but was later published as Helen Lester (1865). The American Reform Society encouraged her to write more stories, and went on LO publish her second book for children, Jessie Wells; or, How to Save the Lost (1865).
A few years later after her marriege, Isabella moved with her husband from Almond, New York, to Utica, and then to New Hartford. Due to Isabella's son ill health, her family spent several years in Winter Park, Florida, from which they moved to Pennsylvania and then to Palo Alto, California.
Between assisting her husband with parish work, teaching a Sunday school class of a hundred children, raising her son, and writing her 150 books, Alden did not have to worry about tempting the devil with idle hands. In addition, she composed primary school lessons for Westminster Teacher, edited the Presbyterian Primary Quarterly, and, from 1874 to 1896, she edited a weekly religious magazine for children called Pansy. Every winter she wrote a serial story for the Herald and Presbyter.
Isabella published just a couple more books before her own death from cancer in August, 1930.
Deeply religious, she saw her books as a way to bring Christian values to a young audience.
Looking back, Alden recalled that after writing her first book in response to the contest, she decided to devote all her writing to expounding Christian principles.
Alden’s long hours working for the church provided material for many of her stories, and comfort for herself. Fiction offered her a way to reshape unruly, often distressing experiences to provide catharsis, meaning, and divine justice.
Views
Quotations:
“My very first little story books were written with a single distinct purpose in view, given over to the desire and determination to win souls for Jesus Christ.”
"No occupation in this world is more trying to soul and body than the care of young children. What patience and wisdom, skill and unlimited love it calls for. God gave the work to mothers and furnished them for it, and they cannot shirk it and be guiltless."
"Do not lower the standard or cater to the worldly laxness of the average Christian by making the way in easy. Make sure that everyone who joins fully understands his duties and obligations and is willing, in Christ's strength, to undertake them."
Connections
In May 1866, Isabella wed the Reverend Gustavus R. Alden, a descendant of John Alden. Their only son, Raymond MacDonald Alden, was born on March 30, 1873.