Margaret Murray was born in India in 1863, in what was then the Bengal Presidency. Her father ran a paper mill and her mother was a missionary. Her education was sporadic, largely because women of her social class were not expected to work for a living. She did train as a nurse, however, during India’s cholera epidemic and carried out social work in England.
From 1894, despite having no qualifications, she enrolled in the newly opened Egyptology department at University College, London. Here she stayed for many years, lecturing and encouraging the students of her ‘gang’ and working with William Flinders Petrie, one of the foremost archaeologists of his generation. The work took her to Egypt and led to her publishing a number of works.
On the outbreak of the First World War, Margaret volunteered as a nurse in France. Exhausted by this, she went to Glastonbury in Somerset and became immersed in the Arthurian/Holy Grail legends and her archaeology morphed into folklore and anthropology. She was given an honorary doctorate in 1927 and she travelled extensively before retiring seven years later.
As president of the Folklore Society, she fascinated thousands and shocked several with her publications on witchcraft and demonology, on which she had controversial views. She remained alert, adept and still writing into extreme old age, publishing her autobiography My First Hundred Years in 1963, the year of her death in Welwyn, Hertfordshire.
Her legacy lives on today in the writings of H.P. Lovecraft and the whole modern Wicca movement. She was a determined feminist, striking a blow for emancipation in a world dominated by male privilege.