Woman As She Should Be; Or, Agnes Wiltshire

Mary Eliza Herbert (1829-1872) was an editor, a poet and novelist who was born in Halifax. She was the daughter of Irish immigrants Catherine and Nicholas Michael Herbert. Herbert began to write early, inspired by the example of her older half-sister Sarah (1824-1846) a poet and novelist who died young. In 1851 she founded The Mayflower, a periodical which struggled to survive in a literary climate not yet viable for such an enterprise, while its editor contributed much of its material herself under such pseudonyms as M. E. H., M., H., and Marion, but it ceased publication in 1852. Herbert also produced Belinda Dalton; or, Scenes in the Life of a Halifax Belle (1859) and two other novels, as well as The Aeolian Harp (1857), a volume of poetry. In 1865, Herbert published privately Flowers by the Wayside: A Miscellany of Prose and Verse.