The New York Times reported: Margaret Woodrow Wilson Finds Peace as Disciple of Yoga in India; Daughter of Late President Has Spent Four Years at Asram in Pondicherry -- Has No Desire to Return to United States. (January 28, 1943).
The New York Times: Wilson’s Daughter Dies a Recluse at 57 in Religious Colony in India (February 13, 1944)
Born in 1886, Margaret Woodrow Wilson grew up in the glare, being the daughter of the 28th President of the USA. Later in her life, she developed a deep and unmistakable interest in spiritual literature. That hunger led her to Sri Aurobindo’s writings, and eventually, in 1938, to Pondicherry itself, where she adopted the name “Nishtha” and remained until her death in 1944. 
Margaret abided in the nearness and reality of God. However, she couldn't countenance the church. As a young girl, she walked out during Communion and never went back. 
According to one friend, Margaret was a sort of spiritual rebel, defying God in order to “make of the shoddy materials of human existence some thing finer than he seems to intend."' 
By 1929, she craved only “the Realization of God consciousness” and did “not really care about anything else."
In the early thirties, she began studying with Swami Nikhilananda, a direct disciple of Ramakrishna's wife, Sarada Devi. 
The Vedanta Society and its offshoots still dominated the field in yoga instruction, particularly on the East Coast. Nikhilananda had opened the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center in New York on Manhattan's West Fifty-seventh Street in 1933, and Swami Bodhananda was still teaching at the Vedanta Society on West Seventy-first Street
However, Indian religious classics and the writings of mystics began to interest her some ten years back. Purely by chance, Margaret had first picked up Aurobindo's Essays on the Gita in the New York Public Library in 1932. She had come across an intriguing reference to Aurobindo in Romain Rolland's Prophets of the New India. Reading Aurobindo's Essays under the vaulted wood ceiling, she so completely lost track of the time that, at closing, the guards nearly had to throw her out. She returned daily until she finished the book. It made such an impression that she resolved to join Sri Aurobindo's ashram.
After enlisting Swami Nikhilananda's help in making sense of Aurobindo's work, she began a correspondence with the “Master,” as Aurobindo was then known. "The longing for liberation and union with the Highest is obsessing me," she confided in her first letter to him, "and I want it to deepen until there is no other desire left."21 
In another letter sent sometime in 1936, she requested permission to visit Aurobindo's ashram. 
He refused her initial request, coming up with several reasons-- she was ill, the South Indian heat was unbearable, she'd benefit more from a visit after she had “gone some way in the path.” (Margaret did suffer from arthritis, among other maladies.) 
Still, Ari Aurobindo encouraged her in other ways. He outlined the first steps in turning her desire for realization into "spiritual experience," which was to meditate on the heart, the "cardiac center in the middle of the chest," or the head, in the "mental center," or to offer "all activities to the Divine." 
She felt that New York City was not conducive to practicing yoga. Her preference was to travel to Pondicherry and study with Aurobindo, but Margaret wasn't content to wait for that day, whenever it arrived, to make the outer reality of her life match the inner one. 
By 1937, after a dozen years spent “mulling" over the discipline and a few studying Integral Yoga intently, Margaret felt her entire life now flowed from the practice. "Indeed, if I were told that I had no call to Yoga, I should be without any mainspring in my life now," she had written her friend Lois Roth Kellogg. “Don't you feel that way, too. Once given a glimpse of this Goal, how can one have any other afterward?"25 
Fortunately, in the spring of 1938, Margaret received an invitation to visit Aurobindo's Ashram. Margaret was advised to bring simple cotton dresses, light underwear, a sun umbrella, and light canvas shoes, and was promised that many American products, such as tinned fruits and vegetables, would be available in the market near the ashram.29 
When Margaret finally did set sail for the subcontinent on September 6, 1938, not a single reporter was on the docks to record her departure. Her plan, which she confided to only a few sympathetic friends, was to "be gone as long as the Spirit keeps me in India."
At any rate, on arriving in Bombay, she immediately felt at home and wanted to say to people on the street, “Don't you realize I am one of you?”
"One has to be here to realize how very practical and actual is the effect of Yoga," she wrote to friends in New York, “particularly this Yoga on the lives of those who practice it-I have never seen such a wonderful group of people in my life." 
She worked hard at yoga, waking at 6:30 a.m. to meditate, then meditating again after lunch, when most in the town were taking their midday “siesta," and again in the evening, after supper. Her evenings ended with chores—she and the other disciples washed Aurobindo's dinner dishes since they wouldn't let the servants touch them and a short meditation before bed. 2 
Aurobindo was, in her estimation, one of the "fully persuaded world-saviors, like Christ or Buddha.” Not even her own father, who helped broker the end of the world's bloodiest war to date, could claim such powers of peace-giving. Unlike her father, Aurobindo had “rent the veil of matter" and existed somehow "beyond mind and speech.”53 
During the Second World War, the UD statement was trying to bring all Americans back to the USA. Despite the U.S. State Department's efforts to evacuate American civilians living in the Far East, Margaret chose to stay in India and would live through Pearl Harbor at the ashram. 
She was as near to her guru as she could possibly get, and in yoga, she had found something akin to a career. Yoga focused on her prodigious energies and made her feel useful. 
Once she settled in Pondicherry, Margaret quickly became a one-woman publicity machine for her guru, sending out dozens of letters to scholars at top universities, requesting that they review one volume or another of Aurobindo's newly completed book, The Life Divine.
She never hesitated to trade on her name for Aurobindo or the connections her status as a former first daughter had bequeathed upon her. She wrote directly to university presidents and scholars with whom she had only a passing acquaintance and donated Aurobindo's books to libraries at numerous universities, including Yale, Columbia, Princeton, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Chicago, as well as public libraries in St. Louis, Boston, and New York. She urged both Nikhilananda and her friend Elsie Weil, an editor at Asia magazine, to help her get the word out. 
Margaret fell seriously ill in 1942. In March, Swami Nikhilananda appealed directly to Aurobindo, pleading with him to persuade Margaret to come home. 
Margaret replied directly, through the U.S. consulate, “I am in fine shape again. . . . I am making no arrangements to return to America, as my work is keeping me here.” 
In February 1944, the Times reported: “Margaret Woodrow Wilson Dies a Recluse at 57 in Religious Colony in India." 
Once the restrictions were lifted after the Second World War, Eleanor Wilson McAdoo decided to leave Margaret's body in peace in India, where she had wanted to be all along, a place where few would question her devotion to yoga.