Wallace, Ellen

Ellen Wallace is an author about whom limited public information is currently available; details such as nationality, dates of birth and death, and educational background are not clearly recorded. Three works by this author are held in the collection, all of them volumes of Margaret Capel: A Novel, namely volume one, volume two, and volume three, which suggests that this long novel is her most notable representative work to date. Judging from the title and the divided-volume format, the work belongs to the traditional novel genre, built around the development of characters and plot, and serial publication in volumes was also a common mode of circulation for nineteenth-century fiction. Because biographical and critical materials are lacking, it is difficult at present to ascertain the overall character of her writing style or her place in literary history; readers may gain a direct sense of her narrative technique and character portrayal through these three volumes.