John A. Macdonald - Biographies of Family and Colleagues

From Macdonald

Sir John A. Macdonald's wife Isabella may have married him out of desperation, speculates Dr. James McSherry of The University of Western Ontario. She was 34. If a woman of those times was not betrothed or married by 19 or 20, the obstetrician told Family Practice magazine, "the family began to think about putting her away. Many of the sanatoriums or asylums in Upper Canada were originally designed to deal with unmarried women who didn't stay home and do the housework."

Globe & Mail, 19 February 2026

Lady Agnes Macdonald

"July 1867. Friday 5th. My beautiful new Diary Book! I am ever so pleased with it, and have been examining & admiring it for full ten minutes! The Lock too -- ! My Diaries as Miss Bernard did not need such precautions but then I was an insignificant young spinster, and what I might write didn’t matter, now I am a great Premier’s wife & Lady Macdonald & “Cabinet Secrets & Mysteries” might drop or slip off, unwittingly, from the nib of my pen. That is, they might do so, if my pen had any nib or if I knew any Cabinet secrets, which I certainly don’t - but then a Locked Diary looks consequential, and just now I am rather in that line myself - I mean the consequential line of course. My Husband’s title is just five days old, so, for a short time longer I may be excused for some little bumptiousness.

It has been a hot fusty day, but these are fusty times. This new Dominion of ours came noisily into existence on the 1st and the very newspapers look hot and tired with the weight of announcements and Cabinet lists. Here in this house, the atmosphere is so awfully political that sometimes I think the very flies hold Parliament on the kitchen tablecloths! In theory, I regard my husband with much awe, in practice I tease the life out of him…

Transcript from her diary, July 5, 2026 (National Archives of Canada, C-122114)