In 1910 Margaret Duley graduated from the Methodist College in St. John's, and shortly after in 1911 she and her family visited England for an aunt's wedding.

She subsequently decided to study elocution and drama at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, but because of World War I she had to move home.

She joined the Ladies Reading Room and the Current Events Club, a center of advanced opinion that produced many of the leaders of the Newfoundland women's suffrage movement, as did the WPA.

Duley's second novel, Cold Pastoral, is said to be influenced by the case of a real missing child lost in the woods [citation needed].

The authenticity of the lifestyles of outport life and the poverty of depression-era Newfoundland resonated in the United States and Britain but resulted in acquaintances in her town being unimpressed.

[citation needed] Her next novel, Highway to Valour (1941), is set against the backdrop of the devastating tidal wave that struck the Burin Peninsula in 1929, and the subsequent life of the young heroine, Mageila, in St. John's.

[8] A short story called Sea Dust, which features a ship's cat rescued from the beaches of Dunkirk also stems from this period.