diff --git a/src/shapes/text.class.js b/src/shapes/text.class.js
index 66a9164f..1c74e483 100644
--- a/src/shapes/text.class.js
+++ b/src/shapes/text.class.js
@@ -1038,8 +1038,25 @@
     if (!options.originX) {
       options.originX = 'left';
     }
-    var textContent = element.textContent.replace(/^\s+|\s+$|\n+/g, '').replace(/\s+/g, ' '),
-        text = new fabric.Text(textContent, options),
+
+    var textContent = '';
+
+    // The XML is not properly parsed in IE9 so a workaround to get 
+    // textContent is through firstChild.data. Another workaround would be
+    // to convert XML loaded from a file to be converted using DOMParser (same way loadSVGFromString() does)
+    if (!('textContent' in element)) {
+      if ('firstChild' in element && element.firstChild !== null) {
+        if ('data' in element.firstChild && element.firstChild.data !== null) {
+          textContent = element.firstChild.data;
+        }
+      }
+    } else {
+      textContent = element.textContent;
+    }
+
+    textContent = element.textContent.replace(/^\s+|\s+$|\n+/g, '').replace(/\s+/g, ' ');
+    
+    var text = new fabric.Text(textContent, options);
         /*
           Adjust positioning:
             x/y attributes in SVG correspond to the bottom-left corner of text bounding box