Mrs Henry Wood

Mrs. Henry Wood 1814-87, English novelist whose maiden name was Ellen Price. Her melodramatic and sensational novel East Lynne (1861) was dramatized and became a permanent stock piece for more than a generation. Most of her work appeared first in the magazine Argosy, which she bought in 1867.

Wood, Ellen, née Price, better known as Mrs Henry Wood (1814–87), married Henry Wood, a banker, in 1836. She had an immense success with her first novel East Lynne (1861). She subsequently owned and edited the magazine the Argosy, and wrote nearly 40 novels, among the best of which are Mrs Halliburton's Troubles (1862), The Channings (1862), and The Shadow of Ashlydyat (1863). Her ingenious plots about murders, thefts, and forgeries, her numerous court scenes and well-planted clues, make her in such novels as Lord Oakburn's Daughters (1864), Elster's Folly (1866), and Roland Yorke (1869) one of the forerunners of the modern detective story. The sensational, and occasionally supernatural, events in her novels are presented in solidly detailed settings of middle-class country-town communities.