Margaret Bland (November 24, 1898 – March 21, 1996) was an American playwright and poet who participated in the Playmakers Folk Drama movement at the University of North Carolina in the early part of the twentieth century.

Her mother, Margaret Simons Clarkson, was a descendant of Huguenots (French Protestants) who immigrated from France to the Carolina colonies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

A staunch Episcopalian and a loyal Democrat, he was also a Confederate veteran of the American Civil War, having enlisted at Lincolnton, North Carolina, at the age of sixteen.

Fifty years later, she gave a welcoming address to the graduating class of 1934 explaining why "Female" was no longer in the current name of the college, Queens-Chicora (now Queens University of Charlotte).

She spent school vacations in a rustic inn in Little Switzerland, a resort community high in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina.

He was a justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court, a proponent of prohibition, an advocate of the Good Roads Movement, and an active member of the Episcopal church.

After graduating in 1920, she pursued her interest in playwriting through studies in the Department of Dramatic Arts of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, specializing in one-act plays.

Haunted by memories of her fugitive spouse, she spends her wedding night staring at candles she has lighted in the vain hope of welcoming him back home.

"[11] Rodney Crowther, in an article in the Asheville Citizen, wrote that "Margaret Bland had accomplished something comparable in beauty to many of the same sort of brief studies for which Guy de Maupassant in his short stories became so famous.

Also based on characters living in a remote area of the Blue Ridge Mountains, it concerns a teenage girl who yearns for a pink dress and a society woman from the outside world who brings her an old, patched garment as a present.

In 1960, it was the inspiration for a short musical play, A Pink Party Dress, written by Mark Bucci and David Rogers and published in an acting edition by Samuel French.

In 1930, Margaret Bland left Yale Drama School, returned to the South, and married Frank Anderson Sewell, a widowed insurance executive with two daughters.

Family lore says that he had pursued her unsuccessfully before she left for New Haven, but then eventually appeared there carrying an almost life-size bust of Dante, her favorite poet, which apparently convinced her to marry him.

[citation needed] Stepmother to two girls, Sallie and Julia, and mother to two children of her own, Edith and Frank Jr., she not only managed a busy domestic household but continued to write and publish plays and poems under her maiden name.

[15] For a time, she conducted independent research on Eugène Ionesco, the Romanian-French playwright who was one of the foremost figures of the avant-garde Parisian theater, the Theatre of the Absurd.