BANKS, Margaret A(melia) 1928-

PERSONAL: Born July 3, 1928, in Quebec City, Quebec, Canada; daughter of Thomas Herbert and Bessey (Collins) Banks. Ethnicity: "Anglo-Scottish." Education: Bishop's University, Lennoxville, Quebec, Canada, B.A. (with honors), 1949; University of Toronto, M.A., 1950, Ph.D., 1953. Religion: Anglican.

ADDRESSES: Agent—c/o Author's Mail, McGill-Queen's University Press, 3430 McTavish St., Montreal, Quebec, Canada H3A 1X9. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Ontario Archives, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, archivist, 1953-61; University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada, law librarian, 1961-89, assistant professor, 1967-74, associate professor, 1974-86, professor of law and history, 1986-89, professor emeritus, 1989—.

MEMBER: Canadian Association of Law Libraries, Canadian Historical Association, American Institute of Parliamentarians, National Association of Parliamentarians (United States), Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, Arts and Letters Club of Toronto.

WRITINGS:

Edward Blake, Irish Nationalist: A Canadian Statesman in Irish Politics, 1892-1907, University of Toronto Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1957.

Using a Law Library: A Guide for Students in the Common-Law Provinces of Canada, School of Library and Information Science, University of Western Ontario (London, Ontario, Canada), 1971, 2nd edition published as Using a Law Library: A Guide for Students and Lawyers in the Common-Law Provinces of Canada, Carswell Co. (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1974, 5th edition published as Banks on Using a Law Library: A Canadian Guide to Legal Research, 1991, 6th edition (with Karen E. H. Foti), 1994.

The Libraries at Western, 1970 to 1987, with Summaries of Their Earlier History and a 1988 Postscript, University Library System, University of Western Ontario (London, Ontario, Canada), 1989.

Understanding Canada's Constitution, Including Summaries of Some Reports Recommending Changes, privately printed (London, Ontario, Canada), 1991.

(With Virginia Schlotzhauer, Floyd M. Riddick, and John R. Stipp) Parliamentary Opinions II: Solutions to Problems of Organizations, Kendall/Hunt Publishing (Dubuque, IA), 1992.

Sir John George Bourinot, Victorian Canadian: His Life, Times, and Legacy, McGill-Queen's University Press (Montreal, Quebec, Canada), 2001.

Contributor to periodicals, including Parliamentary Journal, 1990—.

WORK IN PROGRESS: An autobiography; continuing research on parliamentary procedure and constitutional law and history.

SIDELIGHTS: Margaret A. Banks told CA: "From the age of eight I wanted to be a writer. As a child I wrote a few little poems and plays; they have not survived. In high school I had a short story published in a yearbook. Since then I have concentrated on nonfiction, writing mainly for scholarly journals, though I have also had several books published. I believe (and I have also been told) that I write in plain English; it isn't necessary to be a scholar to understand what I write.

"My most recent book is Sir John George Bourinot, Victorian Canadian: His Life, Times, and Legacy. People often ask me what led to my interest in Bourinot. To qualify as a professional parliamentarian, I had studied and been examined on books on parliamentary procedure written by Henry M. Robert, George Demeter, Alice Sturgis, and other American authors. Being a Canadian, I thought I should also learn something about Bourinot, long regarded as the leading Canadian authority on the subject. I quickly discovered that Bourinot had many other interests in addition to parliamentary procedure, and all of them were of interest to me. No book-length biography of him had been published, and I decided that I would like to write one. It was a major project which took several years to complete and several more to get published.

"I am now in the very early stages of writing what I hope will be an autobiography. My childhood was spent mainly in Quebec City, where life was very different from what it is today. I was a graduate history student at the University of Toronto when several prominent historians were teaching there. My impressions of them may be of some interest. It was a time when women were simply not appointed to academic positions (unless they had influential relatives) and because of the current popularity of women's history, my experiences in trying to obtain a university teaching position may be of interest. For me, things turned out for the best—I believe that I have had a more interesting life as a law librarian (my principal occupation) than I would have had as a history professor."