Joanna E. (Joanna Ellen) Wood

Born in Lesmahagow, Scotland, in 1867, Joanna Ellen Wood moved with her family to North America as a child and grew up in the Niagara Peninsula. That landscape and its communities became important to her fiction, which often focused on everyday relationships, local tensions, and the pressures placed on women.

Wood published several novels, including The Untempered Wind, Judith Moore, Farden Ha', and A Daughter of Witches. Contemporary readers and critics took notice quickly, and she was described as one of Canada's leading novelists; by 1901, she was reported to be the highest-paid fiction writer in Canada.

She also wrote under the name Jean d'Arc and was sometimes known as Nelly Wood. She died in Detroit in 1927, but her work remains part of the story of early Canadian literature, especially for readers interested in women writers and literary realism.