Turnbull was the youngest of two daughters born to Alexander Halliday Sligh, an immigrant from Scotland, and Lucinda Hannah McConnell, whose family was among earlyScotch-Irish settlers inWestmoreland County, Pennsylvania. Turnbull attended the village school, a boarding school called Washington Female Seminary in'Little Washington', then enrolled at Indiana State Teachers College (nowIndiana University of Pennsylvania or IUP). Turnbull graduated from IUPPhi Beta Kappa and as valedictorian for the class of 1910. She also attended theUniversity of Chicago before starting her career as a high school English teacher.[2][3]
In 1918, she married James Lyall Turnbull, just before his departure for Europe duringWorld War I. He returned, and they were married for 40 years and had one child, a daughter named Martha. The family moved toMaplewood, New Jersey in 1922, where she lived for the rest of her life.[4]
Turnbull had her first short story published byThe American Magazine in 1920, and published further short stories regularly until 1936, when she published her first novel,The Rolling Years.
Turnbull's earliest novels, sometimes called her "Westmoreland Novels", are heavily influenced by Scotch-Irish ethno-religious culture that dominated her upbringing in rural Western Pennsylvania.[3][6] These early novels have been identifies as offering subtle critiques of religious legalism, patriarchy, and industrial excesses.[3] Over the span of her six-decade writing career, Turnbull's later works were increasingly regarded as having old-fashioned morality, which she and others attributed it to a hopeful outlook on life.[7]
^Jalowitz, Alan. "Turnbull, Agnes Sligh" (biography). University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania Center for the Book, retrieved online March 4, 2016 and again on June 23, 2023.
^abcRichards, Samuel J. (December 2024). "Middlebrow Bestseller Obscured: Reconsidering Agnes Sligh Turnbull's Westmoreland Novels".Appalachian Journal: a regional studies review.52 (1–2): 81,93–94.
^Waggoner, Walter H."AGNES TURNBULL, NOVELIST, 93, DIES",The New York Times, February 2, 1982. Accessed October 24, 2007. "Agnes Sligh Turnbull, a popular and prolific novelist and shortstory writer, died Sunday at St. Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston, N.J. She was 93 years old and had lived in Maplewood, N.J., for 60 years."
