Born in London in 1779 as Mary Margaret Blair, this author, translator, and journalist was educated by her mother, with possible assistance from masters. In addition to history, composition, and a seemingly unusual understanding of the sciences, she developed proficiency in French, Italian, Latin, Dutch, German, and Spanish. Her father was a successful non-conformist businessman with an inclination to gamble, connected with many of the leading intellectuals of the day, and Mary Margaret was exposed to their conversation, another probable informal source of education. She married barrister William Busk (1769-1849) in 1796. William was initially prosperous, but after some losses sustained in an expensive and unsuccessful parliamentary election campaign, he was insolvent, and Mary Margaret turned to writing for remuneration, publishing for the first time when she was in her 40s. Family connections to Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine enabled her to break into periodical work, initially anonymously, but soon she began negotiating with periodical editors under her own name. She contributed a large number of articles to each of the Foreign Quarterly Review, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, and the Athenaeum, as well as perhaps a few contributions to other periodicals, theorizing about and reviewing literature in all the languages in which she had facility. Her work offers a substantial contribution to familiarizing British audiences with a broad range of foreign literature. In addition to her reviewing work, she authored poems, plays, tales, and histories. Some of her more noteworthy publications include the novel Zeal and Experience (1819); Tales of Fault and Feeling (1825); History of Spain and Portugal (1833); Plays and Poems (1837); Biographical Sketches European and Asiatic (1847), intended for children; and Mediaeval Popes, Emperors, Kings, and Crusaders, or, Germany, Italy, and Palestine, from a.d. 1125 to a.d. 1268, a work in four volumes (1854-1856). Busk died in 1863.