Emma Caroline, Lady Wood (15 January 1802 – 15 December 1879) was a British novelist and artist. She wrote more than a dozen novels, at least one under the pen name C. Sylvester.
Life and career
Emma Caroline Michell was born on 15 January 1802, in Portugal. She was the youngest daughter of Admiral Sampson Michell, a British Royal Navy officer who served as Commander-in-Chief of the Portuguese Navy. Initially she was raised in Lisbon, but when Napoleon invaded Portugal in 1807, Admiral Mitchell left his family in Truro, England and sailed with the Portuguese royal family to Brazil, where he died in 1809.
In 1820, she married the Rev. John Page Wood, later 2nd Baronet. Thanks to the influence of his father, Sir Matthew Wood, 1st Baronet, Emma Wood briefly served as Lady of the Bedchamber to Queen Caroline before her death in 1821. Emma Wood had 13 children, including novelists Emma Barrett-Lennard and Anna Caroline Steel, Field Marshal Sir Henry Evelyn Wood and Katharine O'Shea, the mistress of Charles Stewart Parnell.
In the 1830s, Emma Wood exhibited watercolour paintings and became a professional book illustrator. She illustrated a book of poetry, Ephemera, that she and her daughter Anna published under the names Helen and Gabrielle Carr.
After Rev. Wood died in 1866, Emma Wood began publishing novels, many nautical-themed. John Sutherland wrote about her Ruling the Roast (1874) that he suspected there was "an autobiographical element in the portrait of Myra Leith, the unhappy heroine...who unwisely marries the oafish clergyman son of an earl."
Emma Caroline Wood died on 15 December 1879 in Belhus, Essex.