Best known for her early military fiction, John Strange Winter (
nom de plume of Henrietta Palmer, later Stannard) was a prolific and popular author of over a hundred novels and volumes of short stories. Writing in the late nineteenth and very early twentieth centuries, she also produced a journal,
Winter's Weekly, editing it from 1891 to 1894 and possibly acting as owner and publisher until 1895. John Strange Winter's work, while not innovative in form or content, is engaging. It often provides an insight into the middle class that composed much of her audience, and to which she herself belonged.
Milestones
1870 Henrietta Palmer (who later wrote as JSW) attempted to publish her first 'literary venture', a story entitled either "Clotilde's Vengeance" or "The Story of the French Revolution", at the age of fourteen.
Spring 1885 Bootles' Baby: A Story of the Scarlet Lancers, probably JSW's best-known work, was serialised in
The Graphic magazine. It appeared in volume form the same year.
1891 to September 1894 JSW launched and edited an illustrated penny weekly magazine. It was initially called
Golden Gates, but this title was felt to be too religious, and was eventually changed to
Winter's Weekly.
1912 It appears that JSW's last original novel was
Miss Peggy: The Story of a Very Modern Girl, published posthumously the year after her death.
