Why Margaret Doody is on this page

Heritage: Canadian novelist and Notre Dame literary scholar of New Brunswick Maritime origin; the Saint John area’s Doody and Doody-Murphy lineages emigrated principally from the Irish south-east in the nineteenth century. Heritage paragraph foregrounds the Maritime-Canadian-Irish diaspora context.

Margaret Anne Doody (born 1939) is a Canadian novelist and literary scholar — Professor of Literature at the University of Notre Dame, where she helped found the PhD in Literature programme and served as its Director from 2001 to 2007 — best known publicly for her detective novel series featuring Aristotle as the investigator. The series began with *Aristotle Detective* and continued through *Aristotle and the Fatal Javelin* (1980), *Aristotle and the Poetic Justice* (2000) and several later volumes, set against the meticulously researched landscape of fourth-century-BCE Athens. Her academic writing — most importantly *The True Story of the Novel* (Rutgers, 1996) — argued for a far longer global lineage of the prose novel than the conventional “rise of the novel in the eighteenth-century English tradition”, tracing the form back through the Greek romance, the Latin novel and a wide range of non-European fiction.

Heritage notes

Family root: Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada — irish-diaspora-named-canadian-maritime-irish.

The directory threads Margaret Doody back to the O'Dubhda clan story via the surname-variants reality — the same family carried these spellings as it scattered. See the septs and the diaspora for the wider pattern, or the Clan DNA Project for the genetic connections being mapped now.