Wood

Wood, MRS HENRY (née Ellen Price), born in Worcester, 17th January 1814, daughter of a glove-manufacturer, was married early to Mr Henry Wood, a merchant in France, but settled after his death in London, and commenced writing for The New Monthly Magazine and Bentley's Miscellany. Her first novel was Danesbury House (1860), a prize tale of the Scottish Temperance League, followed by East Lynne (1861), which had an almost unexampled success, although in no sense a great story. Having found her public, Mrs Wood poured forth in succession upwards of thirty novels more, perhaps the best being The Channings (1862), The Shadow of Ashlydyat (1863), Oswald Cray (1864), A Life Secret (1867), Dene Hollow (1871), Within the Maze (1872), and Pomeroy Abbey (1878). In her novels she contrived to unite plot and melodrama without outraging morality, but her work never rises in quality above the commonplace, and there is ever present a thread of vulgarity. She revealed, however, some power in the analysis of character apart from plot in her anonymous Johnny Ludlow stories (1874, 1880). Mrs Wood in 1867 became the proprietor of the Argosy magazine, and her novels appeared in it long after her death, on 10th February 1887. See Memorials (1895) by her son.