SSBKW, born in York, is considered Maine’s first woman novelist and America’s first gothic novelist. Until she was 19, she, her parents and her siblings lived with her grandfather, Judge Jonathan Sayward, one of the most affluent men in Maine. At 19, she married Richard Keating, a law clerk in her grandfather’s office. When he died five years later (1783), she had two young daughters and was pregnant with a third child, a son. Wood’s first novel, “Julia and the Illuminated Baron: A Novel: Founded on Recent Facts, Which Have Transpired in the Course of the Late Revolution of Moral Principles in France”, was published in 1800. It is a melodrama set in France and focuses on the activities of the Free Society of the Illuminati.
“Dorval: or, The Speculator: a Novel, Founded on Recent Facts”, (1801) was a fictional account of the real 1796 Yazoo frauds, telling of the schemer Dorval’s role in the Georgia land speculation that involved bribes to state legislators. With “Amelia, or The Influence of Virtue: An Old Man’s Story”, (1802), and “Ferdinand and Elmira: A Russian Story”, (1804), she returned to European settings for her romantic melodramas.
In 1804, she married her second husband, General Abiel Wood, moving to Wiscasset. After he died in 1811, she, now Madame Wood, went to live in Portland. Her fifth and last book, “Tales of the Night”, (1827/1982 facsimile reprint), contains two stories – Storms and Sunshine, or the House on the Hill and The Hermitage, or Rise of Fortune, set in Maine and New Hampshire. Desiring anonymity, she wrote and published under pseudonyms. On the title pages of her first four books she is identified as either “A Lady” or “A Lady from Massachusetts.” Since “Tales of the Night” was published after Maine became a state in 1820, she is identified as “A Lady from Maine” on its title page.