Margaret Fairless Barber (7 May 1869 – 24 August 1901), pseudonym Michael Fairless, was an English Christian writer whose book of meditations, The Roadmender (1902), became a popular classic.

Margaret Barber, English nature-writer and mystic, was born at Castle Hill, Rastrick, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, the daughter of Fairless Barber and Maria (Musgrave) Barber. She read Scott and Dickens before the age of twelve and fraternized with frogs; later pets included Jacob, a French bulldog, Phoebe, a magnificent orange Persian, and Trilby, another cat that looked like "a depressed charwoman." For a time she was a nurse, known as The Fighting Sister, in one of London's worst slums, the Jago.

A spinal weakness had developed in her girlhood, and she became a semi-invalid in a roadside country cottage, the lodge of an empty and decaying house and park, with a decrepit old woman and a mentally deficient girl for maids. She gave food, patches, and thread to tramps, who marked her gateposts with safety signs against other tramps. She also lived in an old Georgian home on the Chelsea Embankment in London.

The Roadmender, "Michael Fairless's" famous devotional book, was written during the twenty months in bed that preceded her death at age thirty-two. The fresh beauty and mystical tone of the book appealed to workmen and queens alike. Posthumously published, as were all her books, it went through thirty-one impressions in its first decade. The last chapter was dictated on her deathbed, after nine days of starvation.