You can almost picture her climbing out of the two-seater plane: short brown hair ruffled by a breeze blowing across the grass airstrip at Buttonville airport in 1960.

Satisfied, dusting off her hands, marching away with her pilot’s licence, never again to sit behind the controls.

Born in 1925, Mary Millard died last May after 88 years as a woman who did the unexpected.

Her entire estimated $6-million estate was handed to charity: $1.5 million to the Canadian Civil Liberties Association educational trust; $2 million to the Toronto Zoo, the largest single donation in its history. And last week, the Architectural Conservancy of Ontario announced it had become the latest surprised recipient of $1.8 million of Mary Millard’s money.

“She’s a bit of a woman of mystery,” said conservancy president Richard Longley. A call came out of the blue this spring from a bank official handling Millard’s estate.

“I said I’d never heard of this woman, this Mary Millard.”

According to family members, she had been kicked out of prestigious Havergal College boarding school as a teen. Then became a teacher. Then quit that. She married, but was so determined not to have children and perform housewifely duties, her Hogg’s Hollow house was designed with a single bedroom. Instead of tidy rows of pansies and snowdrops, she let the garden grow in a natural state, to the consternation of her more traditional neighbours.

Millard’s interest in architecture — besides having beloved uncle Percival Alan Deacon design her home — extended mostly to hating the modern, “monster” houses she saw as an affront to her posh Willowdale neighbourhood. Her love of animals extended to keeping a couple of cats. Millard was not, apparently, very cuddly herself.

The money came from great-grandfather Joseph Jeffrey, one of the five founders of London Life Insurance Company. It was a remarkable family: Millard’s father, the Hon. Edward Richardson, was an Ontario Supreme Court justice. Her parents divorced when the children — Mary, Ed and Bill — were small. Margaret Reid Richardson never remarried but worked as a lecturer in statistics at the University of Toronto, where her sister Beatrice Deacon was a physicist and the first woman to use an electron microscope.

After the young Millard decided the rules at Havergal were too strict, she returned to Jarvis Collegiate and eventually graduated from the University of Toronto. She briefly taught at Victoria Park Collegiate Institute, overlapping for one year, in 1964, with her brother Ed Richardson, now 87, now a retired chemistry and physics teacher.

“She was an eccentric person and had very little patience with bureaucracy. She finally got tired of it,” he said. “She could have ignored it, but chose to fight against it. She was a feisty person.”

Brother Bill had a degree in geophysics, and worked as a computer specialist designing models for the oil and mineral industry. He was also in the Air Force, perhaps prompting Millard to prove she could fly a plane like the boys. (Bill died two decades ago.)

She married Don Millard, an electrical engineer, whose father was Charles H. Millard, a Co-operative Commonwealth Federation MPP for East York in the 1940s and influential in the creation of the Canadian Congress of Labour with David Lewis.

It was an alignment of romance and politics: Millard’s mother, newly divorced, was deeply involved with the CCF — forerunner of the NDP — and would bring her children to summer camp at Geneva Park in Muskoka, where she attended political conferences.

“We were all involved at an early age,” said Richardson, who recalls babysitting the young Stephen Lewis as a child.

Coming from a family with a progressive pedigree, she’d have been proud to call herself a feminist. “She got that from her mother,” he said.

Millard was a woman of some contradiction: compelling but not friendly. A gracious hostess with few close friends. An avid reader who was once kicked out of school. Loving to her nieces, but unmotherly.

Nancy Stokes remembers her as an imposing figure, though she was just average size. Millard helped found the Toronto chapter of the Jane Austen Society of North America during the early 1980s, which is how she met Stokes. An annual general meeting she organized in 1982 was attended by Robert Stanfield, former Nova Scotia premier, prime ministerial candidate and Jane Austen fan, according to Stokes.

Writing often during the 1980s in Persuasions, the society’s annual journal, Millard is prickly at times: “I know that I am contradicting many of the most eminent critics …” she wrote, along with “Jane Austen expected us to be ingenious” and “If you can’t figure all this out, you’re a dull elf.”

An annual picnic known as Donwell Day, named after Donwell Abbey, where the characters in Emma go to pick strawberries, was held on the back lawn of the Millard home for several years. She always remembered to provide a huge bowl of berries, Stokes said. And yet, abruptly left the society.

“She didn’t want to play. She was her own woman. She had her own ideas,” said Stokes, the national membership secretary.

Millard’s husband died decades ago. She lived her later years as a single woman, and her accumulated wealth and heirlooms were left for her to disperse when she died.

The family was close at one time. Jane Richardson and her aunt had much in common. Both were teachers; neither had children. There were cooking lessons and trips to the museum.

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But nothing in the estate went to her remaining family. Richardson even had to buy back some of the jewelry and furniture at auction, though much of it was lost for good. A falling-out around the time of Bill’s death had left a bitter taste in Millard’s mouth, but no one realized the extent.

“She would just make up her mind and that was it,” Jane said, adding that no one is angry, exactly, about Millard’s final decisions.

“These are three charities we heartily endorse,” she said. “People should do what they want with their own money.”