Background
Morley, Margaret Warner, , Iowa 1858 1923 Female Author Educator educator and author, daughter of Isaac and Sarah Robinson (Warner) Morley, was born in Montrose, Iowa.
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Margaret Morley
Edit ProfileEducation
The family removed to Brooklyn, N. Y. , and there Margaret attended the public schools, the curricula of which were supplemented by private instruction.
Her more advanced education was received at the Oswego, N. Y. , Normal School and the New York City Normal College, from which she was graduated in 1878.
Becoming interested in biology, she carried on special studies in that subject at Armour Institute, Chicago, and at the Woods Hole, Massachussets, marine laboratories.
As a teacher she naturally found her way into normal schools and held positions in the Oswego and Milwaukee, Wis. , State Normal Schools, as well as in the high school at Leavenworth, Kan.
In connection with courses prepared for her classes, she began to gather material for books on the life of birds, insects, and small animals and it is as a writer she did her most important work.
Career
Some of her most popular nature-study books are: Seed Babies (1896), botany for small children; Flowers and their Friends (1897); The Honey Makers (1899); Little Wanderers (1899), descriptions of plants for children; Down North and Up Along (1900), travels in Nova Scotia and Cape Breton, with good atmosphere and word pictures of the inhabitants and their customs; Wasps and their Ways (1900); The Insect Folk (1903); Little Mitchell; the Story of a Mountain Squirrel (1904); Butterflies and Bees; the Insect Folk, vol.
II (1905); Donkey John of the Toy Valley (1909), the result of a visit to the Austrian Tyrol; The Carolina Mountains (1913), a rhapsody and a super-guide-book to her much loved North Carolina; Will-o'-the-Wasps (1913); and The Apple-Tree Sprite (1915).
Margaret Morley loved out-door life and spent some months of each year in Tryon, N. C. , where she observed for herself the growth of plants and the habits of animals.
She often carried a pet squirrel in her pocket, which gave her the material for Little Mitchell.
[Who's Who in America, 1922-23; Woman's Who's Who of America, 1914-15; New Internat.
Year Book, 1923; Margaret W. Morley, "Nature Study and its Influence, " Outlook, July 27, 1901; the Evening Star (Wash. , D. C. ), Dec. 13, 1923; N. Y. Times, Dec. 15, 1923. ]
Connections
Those of her books written for the purpose of teaching children and young people the facts of sex and birth shocked many in the nineties but in comparison with the frankness of later writings on the subject they seem somewhat vague and sentimental.
Her most important books of this type are: A Song of Life (1891); Life and Love (1895), a book for older children; The Renewal of Life; How and When to Tell the Story to the Young (1906); and The Spark of Life; the Story of How Living Things Come into the World, as Told for Girls and Boys (1913), which was designed for parents to read to young children.
