| Main entry | Lauder, Maria |
|---|
| Birth place | St. Armand, Quebec (possibly Vermont) |
|---|
| Birth date | 20 February 1833 |
|---|
| Death place | Toronto, Ontario |
|---|
| Death date | 1 June 1922 |
|---|
| Identifier | 0007 |
|---|
| Birth name | Maria Elise Turner Toof |
|---|
| Alternate names | Toofie |
|---|
| Married name | Lauder |
|---|
| Marital status | married |
|---|
| Religious affiliation | Methodist |
|---|
| Paid work | teacher (school) |
|---|
| Biography | In the years before women were admitted to universities in Canada, Maria Elise Turner Toof (1833-1922) left her native province of Quebec to attend Oberlin College in Ohio, where she graduated with Honours from a two-year course in theology. She returned to Canada to become a teacher at Whitby Ladies' College and married Abram William Lauder (1834-1884), a fellow teacher. They moved to Toronto in 1857 when he decided to study law. As Abram became involved in provincial politics with his first election to the Ontario legislature in 1867, Maria assumed the duties of a philanthropist and an ardent member of the Women's Christian Temperance Union. A talented linguist, she travelled extensively in Europe (occasionally with her husband and their friends) and developed a reputation as a travel writer. When her only son, the noted pianist William Waugh Lauder, was studying in Europe, she accompanied him, spending a year in Italy where, likely in 1880, she was presented to the Italian royal family and to the Pope, an unusual honour for a Methodist. Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria honoured her with a jewel-encrusted medallion in gratitude for a poem she wrote on the occasion of his wife's death. Her half-sister, Agnes Grote Copeland*, also a poet and the mother of musicians, was later similarly honoured. In accordance with her religious and reformist sensibilities, Maria Lauder wove temperance messages into her narratives. |
|---|
| Travel | England (c 6 mos.), 1870s; Germany and Italy, early 1880s |
|---|
| Other notes | Raise as Maria Elise Grote (sometimes "Groat"). WOMEN OF THE CENTURY reads, "She is of Norman and Huguenot descent, her ancestors having escaped from France to Germany at the time of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes." |
|---|
| Residences | St. Armand, Quebec (1833-); Ohio; Whitby, Ontario (1851); Oshawa, Ontario (1857); Toronto (1857-1922) |
|---|
| Geographic regions | Ontario; Europe |
|---|
| Primary genres | fiction; non-fiction |
|---|
| Books | EVERGREEN LEAVES: BEING NOTES FROM MY TRAVEL BOOK BY 'TOOFIE' (1877); IN EUROPE; LEGENDS AND TALES OF THE HARZ MOUNTAINS, NORTH GERMANY (1885); AT LAST (1893) |
|---|
| Father's name | Whitcomb Powers Toof (or Whitcombe de Touffe) |
|---|
| Life dates of father | 15 February 1806, St. Armand, Quebec - c1838 |
|---|
| Father's note | First marriage to Eliza Simpson in 1827 |
|---|
| Mother's name | Phoebe Harriet Perry |
|---|
| Life dates of mother | c1807, Vermont - c1871, Wellington, Ontario |
|---|
| Mother's note | Second marriage to Rodolphus Fuller Grote |
|---|
| Spouse 1 | Abram William Lauder |
|---|
| Life dates of spouse 1 | 6 June 1834, Bewcastle, Cumberland, England - 20 February 1884, Toronto, Ontario |
|---|
| Spouse 1 note | See entry, Dictionary of Canadian Biography XI |
|---|
| Marriage 1 date | 1856 |
|---|
| Children number | 1 |
|---|
| Children's names and dates | William Waugh (24 October 1857 - 7 August 1931), m. to Cora L. |
|---|
| Biographical references | Morgan, CANADIAN MEN AND WOMEN OF THE TIME (1898); Dagg, THE FEMININE GAZE (2001), p. 160; 1851 Census of Canada East, Canada West, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia; 1851 Census of Canada; 1871 Census of Canada; 1881 Census of Canada; 1911 Census of Canada |
|---|
| Bibliographic references | Watters, CHECKLIST OF CANADIAN LITERATURE...1620-1960 (1970), pp. 324, 969 |
|---|
| Research references | complete |
|---|
| Archival references | letter to Wilfred Laurier, Laurier Papers, National Archives of Canada |
|---|
| Image credits | Image from Frances E. Willard and Mary A. Livermore, eds. A WOMAN OF THE CENTURY: FOURTEEN HUNDRED-SEVENTY BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES ACCOMPANIED BY PORTRAITS OF LEADING AMERICAN WOMEN IN ALL WALKS OF LIFE (Buffalo, NY: Wells Moulton, 1893). |
|---|
| Unverified titles | My First Visit to England (1865) |
|---|
| Copyright | This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/. Please cite Canada's Early Women Writers. SFU Library Digital Collections. Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada. 1980-2014. |
|---|