From the Rare Book Collection... - June 1998 - issue 30, 6 - National Library News - Julia Beckwith Hart

FROM THE WEBSITE
Saint Ursula's Convent is the earliest recorded novel written by a native-born Canadian and published in book form in Canada. The author, Julia Beckwith, was born in Fredericton, New Brunswick, the daughter of a Loyalist father and a French mother. After her father's death, she moved to Kingston to live with her aunt. She established a school for young ladies and, in 1822, married George Henry Hart, a bookbinder from England.
Saint Ursula's Convent had been in preparation for almost 10 years when Julia offered it for publication to Hugh Christopher Thomson, politician, banker and publisher of the Upper Canada Herald. In June 1823, Thomson sent a proposal to gather subscriptions to the novel. It was published anonymously in May of the following year in an edition of 200 copies, 175 already sold to subscribers. This melodramatic, action-filled novel, written primarily for young people, was partially based on family stories Julia had heard as a child, and adhered faithfully to many of the more spectacular conventions prevailing in early 19th-century fiction, such as shipwrecks, separated families and happy (if unlikely) restorations brought about by amazing coincidences. Julia published a second novel, Tonnewonte, or, the Adopted Son of America (Watertown, New York, 1825), after the Harts moved to Rochester. The family returned to Fredericton in 1831, and she died there in 1867, her role as a pioneer Canadian fiction-writer still unheralded.