Margaret Turnbull

Margaret Turnbull was born in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1872 and built a varied writing career that crossed several forms. She is remembered as a novelist, playwright, and screenwriter, with work that helped connect late Victorian and early 20th-century popular storytelling to the emerging film industry.

She was especially active during the silent era. Research from the Women Film Pioneers Project notes that by 1920 she had written or adapted around sixty screenplays, and that her background in novels and plays made her particularly well suited to adapting literary works for the screen. One of her notable stage successes was Classmates, cowritten with William deMille in 1907, which was later filmed.

Turnbull also continued writing fiction while working in film. Her career shows how flexible and ambitious many early women writers were, moving between publishing, theater, and the studio system long before those worlds were treated as separate paths. She died in Yarmouth Port, Massachusetts, in 1942.