Julia Catherine Beckwith

Who was Julia Catherine Beckwith?

Julia Catherine Beckwith was born in Fredericton, New Brunswick on March 10, 1796. She spent much of her early life in Nova Scotia and Quebec. Her mother Julie-Louis Le Burn, daughter of Jean Baptiste Le Brun de Duplessis came from a wealthy French family who immigrated to Canada during the 17th and 18th century. Beckwith’s father Nehemiah Beckwith, was from New England and settled in New Brunswick in 1780, where he owned a successful ship building company. It was through her travels to Quebec and Nova Scotia that she incorporated her experiences through her novels. Beckwith’s mother had renounced her Roman Catholic faith and shared her husbands Methodist views, yet it was her mother’s religious background that would provide the subject matter of Canada’s first novel St Ursula’s Covent at the age of seventeen. Two years after Beckwith wrote her novel, her father died in a drowning accident and in 1820 and she was sent to live in Upper Canada with family where she would establish a boarding school for girls and meet and then marry George Henry Hart.

She married at Kingston, Ontario January 3, 1822, George Henry Hart. It took nearly over ten years for Beckwith to find someone who would publish her work. In 1824, Hugh C. Thomson agreed to publish St. Ursula’s Convent or, The Nun of Canada; Containing Scenes from Real Life, and as Beckwith wished, as an anonymous author. However only 165 copies were made. After Beckwith's romantic novel was criticized as "too complicated", almost all copies were lost.