author
Margaret Ball
1878–1952
A longtime Mount Holyoke teacher who also wrote books, she brought a scholar’s care and a practical teacher’s eye to subjects like literature, writing, and language. Her work now lives on through archival collections and public-domain editions that still attract curious readers.
1 Audiobook
Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature
by Margaret Ball
About the author
Born in New Haven, Connecticut, on April 9, 1878, Margaret Ball studied at Mount Holyoke, earning her bachelor's degree in 1900. She later completed a master's degree in English literature and a Ph.D. in education and comparative literature at Columbia, building the kind of academic background that shaped both her teaching and her writing.
Ball spent most of her professional life at Mount Holyoke College, serving on the faculty from 1901 to 1945. Archival records describe her as both a college teacher and an author, and her papers preserve correspondence, essays, drafts, research notes, and other material from decades of academic life.
Her books include works on writing and literary study, and several of them are now available through Project Gutenberg. That mix of classroom experience and authorship gives her work a clear, purposeful feel: learned, but written to be useful.