Mary Quayle Innis was an economist, writer, editor, and academic administrator, born in St. Mary's, Ohio on April 13, 1899. From 1915 to 1919 she attended the University of Chicago, graduating with a Ph.B. in English. There she met a young Canadian economics instructor, Harold Adams Innis. After their marriage on May 10, 1921, she joined him in Toronto where he had started teaching in the Political Economy Department at the University of Toronto, and where he remained for the rest of his life.

Quayle accompanied her husband on research tours until their children were born: Donald Quayle (April 21, 1924), Mary Ellen (Sept. 5, 1927), Hugh Roderick (Nov. 17, 1930), and Anne Christine (Jan. 25, 1933). Innis continued writing while at home with her family and published a number of stories in the Canadian Forum. She also wrote An Economic History of Canada (1935; revised and enlarged, 1943) which became a standard university text, followed by two other history texts for use in the schools: Changing Canada (2 volumes, Fish, Fur and Exploration and New France and the Loyalists, 1951-1952) and Living in Canada (1954), written in collaboration with Alex A. Cameron and Arnold Boggs. In the 1940s most of her short stories appeared in Saturday Night (forty-five stories between 1938 and 1947). Several of these were rewritten for inclusion in Stand on a Rainbow, (1943), an autobiographical "novel". For ten years Innis was editor of the YWCA Quarterly, and in 1949 she wrote a history of that organization, Unfold the Years, a survey of the growth of the Young Women's Christian Association in Canada from its inception in 1873.

After her husband's death in 1952 Mary Quayle Innis entered a more public life. In 1955 she became Dean of Women at University College, where she served for nine years. She was a Canadian delegate to the Commonwealth Conference on Education held in Oxford in 1959. After her retirement she became vice-chairman of the Committee on Religious Education in the Public Schools of the Province of Ontario. Innis received an LL.D. from Queen's University in 1958 and one from the University of Waterloo in 1965, in recognition of her literary and academic achievements

During these years, Innis continued to write and publish stories and also worked as an editor. Travellers West appeared in 1956 as well as a selection of her husband's articles and addresses, Essays in Canadian Economic History, followed by Mrs. Simcoe's Diary in 1965. Innis also worked with two university groups to edit commemorative anthologies, The Clear Spirit (1966), the centennial project of the Canadian Federation of University Women, and Nursing Education in a Changing Society (1970), for the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the School of Nursing at the University of Toronto.

Mary Quayle Innis died suddenly on 10 January 1972, the day before her revised edition of Harold Innis's Empire and Communications appeared.

Anne Innis Dagg is a former a faculty member at the University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, in Independent Studies. She is a scholar and writer in several areas of interest, from zoology to women's studies. The daughter of Mary Quayle Innis and Harold Adams Innis, Anne was born on January 25, 1933, in Toronto, Ontario.

She became interested in giraffes as a child, and went on to take a BA from the University of Toronto in Honours Biology in 1955 (as gold medalist), and an MA from the University of Toronto in genetics in 1956, where she was also a demonstrator for botany and genetics from 1954-1956. She then traveled alone to South Africa to study the giraffe in 1956-1957.

In 1957 she married Ian Dagg, a physicist. They moved to Waterloo, Ontario, in 1959, where Ian became a professor at the new University of Waterloo.

Anne worked as a part-time lecturer at Waterloo Lutheran University in anatomy and physiology from 1962-1965, and then as an anatomy demonstrator at the University of Waterloo in 1966. In 1967 she earned her PhD, which examined gaits and their development in Infraorder Pecora, from the University of Waterloo. She was also a sessional assistant professor at the University of Guelph, Department of Zoology that year.

Anne Innis Dagg did research at the Taronga Zoo in Sydney, Australia, in 1967-1968, when on Ian’s sabbatical with their family of three children. She was an assistant professor at the University of Guelph, Department of Zoology, from 1968-1972 where she taught mammalogy, wildlife management and general biology. She became a resource person for Integrated Studies at the University of Waterloo from 1978-1985, the Academic Director for Independent Studies (the same program but renamed) from 1986-1989, and finally senior academic advisor for this program from 1989 to the present.

Anne Innis Dagg started Otter Press in 1972 with the publication of Matrix Optics by Ian Dagg and in 1974 Mammals of Waterloo and South Wellington counties by herself. Other books she has written include: Canadian wildlife and man (McClelland and Stewart, 1974); Mammals of Ontario (Otter Press, 1974); The giraffe: its biology, behavior and ecology with J.B. Foster, (Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1976; 1982); Wildlife management in Europe (Otter Press, 1977); Running, walking and jumping: the science of locomotion (Wykeham Science Series, 1977); Camel quest: Research on the Saharan camel (York Publishing,1978, 1989); A reference book of urban ecology (Otter Press, 1981); The camel: its ecology, behavior and relationship with man (University of Chicago Press, 1981); Harems and other horrors: sexual bias in behavioral biology (Otter Press, 1983); The fifty per cent solution. Why should woman pay for men’s culture? (Otter Press, 1986); Moreton Island: its history and natural history (Moreton Island Press, 1986); MisEducation: women and Canadian universities (with P.J. Thompson), OISE Press, 1988); User-friendly university: what every student should know (Otter Press, 1994); The feminine gaze: a Canadian compendium of non-fiction women authors and their books, 1836-1945 (Wilfrid University Press, 2001), and five more books since that time.