Mary E. (Mary Ella) Waller

Born in Boston in 1855, Mary Ella Waller became an American writer and educator whose work ranged widely across genres. Reliable reference sources describe her as a New England author who wrote children’s stories, translated German poetry, and published more than twenty novels.

She is most often remembered for The Wood-Carver of ’Lympus, a historical novel set in Vermont. That regional setting mattered: Waller’s writing is closely tied to New England places and atmosphere, which helped give her fiction a strong local character while still reaching a broad readership.

Waller died in Wellesley, Massachusetts, in 1938. Though she is not as widely read now as some of her contemporaries, her career shows the range of a prolific late-19th- and early-20th-century author who worked across fiction, poetry, translation, and writing for younger readers.