Ellen Wood

-
Standard Name: Wood, Ellen
Birth Name: Ellen Price
Married Name: Mrs Henry Wood
Pseudonym: Johnny Ludlow
Pseudonym: Ensign Thomas Pepper
In a writing career spanning most of the second half of the nineteenth century, EW produced a prodigious body of work (often writing two triple-deckers per year), including sketches, novels, and a series of interconnected Johnny Ludlow tales involving a character of that name, that were published over a twenty-year period. While much of her fiction takes the form of moralistic domestic dramas, EW could also be fascinated by the grotesque, and many of her works have sensational and supernatural themes. Her reputation today rests almost exclusively on the phenomenally popular East Lynne, 1861, possibly the best seller among novels of the Victorian period and the only one of her works that has remained generally available.
Photo of a painting of Ellen Wood by Sydney Hodges. Wood is seated on a red chair gazing straight at the viewer. Her left hand holds a book; she is wearing a blue dress with lace trim around the sleeves and neck, and a lighter blue bow around the collar. Her cap has a broad, sheer ribbon running down from it. She wears a necklace, and a ring on her right index finger. A window behind her opens on a mountain landscape.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Education Elma Napier
In spite of the fact that her family did not value literature as much as games, and that her mother had specific ideas about what girls should read, EN devoured every book she could get...
Family and Intimate relationships Hesba Stretton
HS had a close relationship with Charles Wood , son of the writer Ellen Wood (better known as Mrs Henry Wood).
Cutt, Margaret Nancy. Ministering Angels: A Study of Nineteenth-Century Evangelical Writing for Children. Five Owls Press, 1979.
126-7
Family and Intimate relationships Annie S. Swan
Annie later said that her mother, Euphemia Brown, was wise, practical, and common-sensical. Although proud of Annie's writing, she felt that domestic training was still essential for her, as for all her daughters.
Black, Helen C. Pen, Pencil, Baton and Mask: Biographical Sketches. Spottiswoode, 1896.
340
Annie...
Friends, Associates Rosa Nouchette Carey
After Blind , Carey counted among her friends the novelist Ellen Wood . Her life seems to have been quite retired, and centred on her family. From about 1875 she lived with another friend, a...
Friends, Associates Sarah Tytler
ST 's literary friends by now included Dora Greenwell , Ellen (Mrs Henry) Wood , Anna Maria (Mrs S. C.) Hall , and George MacDonald .
Blain, Virginia, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy, editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
Intertextuality and Influence Rose Allatini
But the manuscript never reaches a publisher, for Olive gives it to her mother, aunt, and sister to read, with fearful results. To her aunt it is indecent and impossible; to her mother it is...
Intertextuality and Influence Anna Atkins
Though AA 's preface concedes the the talent, the ingenuity, the very clever writing of sensation-authors,
Atkins, Anna. A Page from the Peerage. T. Cautley Newby, 1863.
i
it also hints that they are in it for the money, and expresses outrage at what it sees...
Intertextuality and Influence Mrs Showes
This conclusion strikingly anticipates that of Ellen Wood 's East Lynne: it is not, however, known that Wood ever read Statira.
Intertextuality and Influence Sarah Waters
Nance is almost a colourless character apart from her capacity for passion. (In an apparently non-literary book, a tradition of steamy fiction is evoked when her desire to make Kitty sorry makes her think of...
Literary responses Charlotte Yonge
During her lifetime CY was ranked as a serious novelist with Austen , Trollope , Balzac , and Zola . Contemporaries like Louisa Alcott , Margaret Oliphant , Ellen Wood , and Rhoda Broughton made...
Literary responses Anne Marsh
In 1851 the Athenæum reviewer of Ravenscliffe still thought of The Admiral's Daughter as having heralded a remarkable addition to the phalanx of English authoresses.
Athenæum. J. Lection.
1255 (1851): 1198
The preface writer for the cheap reprint...
Literary responses Mary Elizabeth Braddon
In 1951 Canadian novelist Robertson Davies made this book the centre of a fictional anecdote: a distinguished professor bequeaths to his grand-daughter a box of battered old books (Lady Audley's Secret, Mrs Henry Wood
Literary responses Ouida
In a Book Buyer article of January 1897, American novelist and short story writer Stephen Crane called this novel Ouida's Masterpiece and a song of the brave. He particularly liked the character Cigarette, a figure...
Literary responses Rosa Nouchette Carey
Elaine Hartnell argues that the reception of RNC 's work was tied somewhat to its modes and places of publication, notably her serialisation in journals edited by Ellen Wood , Charlotte Yonge , and Annie S. Swan
Occupation Naomi Jacob
After the First World War she became a performer herself, a character woman. She relates an anecdote of foiling an attempt to get her services for nine pounds a week when she had been...

Timeline

1823
William Huskisson , as MP for Liverpool and President of the Board of Trade , secured the equalization of customs duties in Britain and Ireland, a big step on the road towards free trade.
4 November 1836
Richard Bentley (1794-1871) signed an agreement with Dickens to edit his new monthly periodical, Bentley's Miscellany.
April 1863
Henry Mansel in the Quarterly Review attacked sensation novels as preaching to the nerves and as indications of a wide-spread corruption, of which they are in part both the effect and the cause; called into...
December 1865
Alexander Strahan launched The Argosy, a monthly literary and travel magazine, with Isa Craig as its first editor, and Charles Reade 's Griffith Gaunt as its lead serial.
December 1868
With sales of the once-popular Bentley's Miscellany at an all-time low, the owner, Richard Bentley , ended its publication.
1874
Mary Cecil Hay published Old Myddleton's Money, an early detective story combining sensation fiction with small-town satire.
1898
The publishing firm of Richard Bentley and Son , dating from 1 September 1832, was sold for eight thousand pounds to Macmillan .
1920
The number of Miners' Institutes (which included Miners' Libraries ) increased following the decision regularly to supplement the levy financing them from the national Miners' Welfare Fund .