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Julia Catherine Beckwith (1796–1867) was born in Fredericton, New Brunswick on March 10, 1796. Her 1824 novel St. Ursula’s Convent, or, The Nun of Canada was the first novel published by a person born in what is now Canada.

Beckwith's father, Nehemiah Beckwith, was a Connecticut-born loyalist who settled in 1780 in Maugerville, New Brunswick, where he eventually established a successful shipping and shipbuilding business. Her mother, Julie-Louise Lebrun de Duplessis, was the daughter of Jean-Baptiste Lebrun de Duplessis, who came to New France 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 Convent (or The Nun of Canada) 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 (Kingston) with family where she would establish a boarding school for girls and meet and then marry George Henry Hart (between 1822–1824).

She married at Kingston, Ontario January 3, 1822, George Henry Hart. It took nearly over ten years for Beckwith to find someone that 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.

Later, Beckwith and her husband moved to the United States where she would write her second novel Tonnawanda ; or, The Adopted Son of America ; an Indian Story. The novel was published in Rochester, N.Y., as “By an American.” In 1831 Beckwith, along with her husband and six children, moved back to Fredericton, where she would write her third novel, Edith (or The Doom), which was never published.

In 1831 she returned to Fredericton, New Brunswick, where she died on November 28, 1867 at the age of 71. However, she was not recognized until at the end of the century when Canadian writing became of interest. In 1904, chief librarian of the Toronto Public Library, James Bain, obtained a copy of St. Ursula’s Covent at an auction for $8.00. Only five other copies have been discovered (one at the Library of Congress in Washington, the others at the Bibliothèque Nationale de Quebec, Brock University and the University of New Brunswick) and one partial copy resides at the library of McGill University.