Sarah Herbert

Sarah Herbert was born to Nicholas Michael Herbert and Ann Bates in Ireland in October 1824. Her father emigrated to Canada in 1826. He took his young family with him, headed for Quebec, aboard the Nassau which was wrecked off the coast of Sable Island, Nova Scotia on 13 May 1826. Ann Bates died soon after while her daughter was one of two infants saved that day. Herbert's father married again in Halifax on 3 September 1828. His second wife was Catherine Eagan. They later had a second child, Mary Eliza.{{cite book | last=Halpenny | first=F.G. | title=Dictionary of Canadian Biography | publisher=University of Toronto Press | issue=v. 7 | year=1988 | isbn=978-0-8020-3452-6 | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=x-4_Hkor4BgC&pg=PA396 | access-date=2019-09-20 | page=396}}{{cite web | last=Mills | first=Billy | title=Sarah Herbert: Irish Woman Poet | website=Elliptical Movements | date=2014-04-19 | url=https://ellipticalmovements.wordpress.com/2014/04/19/sarah-herbert-irish-woman-poet/ | access-date=2019-09-20}}

Herbert and her sister were both writers. Herbert submitted poetry and stories regularly to journals such as the Olive Branch, the Morning Herald, Commercial Advertiser, and the Novascotian, the Amaranth and the British North American Wesleyan Methodist Magazine. In September 1843 she won a contest supported by the Olive Branch with her serial Agnes Maitland. By 19 April 1844 Herbert had become the editor and proprietor of the Olive Branch. She published writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Catharine Sedgwick and John McPherson. During the 1840s Herbert also ran a local school and was a Sunday school teacher. She was secretary of the Halifax Female Temperance Society.{{cite book | last1=Taylor | first1=M.B. | last2=Owram | first2=D. | title=Canadian History: Beginnings to Confederation | publisher=University of Toronto Press | series=Canadian History: A Reader's Guide | year=1994 | isbn=978-0-8020-6826-2 | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=FamJrJEvymIC&pg=PA252 | access-date=2019-09-20 | page=252}}{{cite book | last1=Scobie | first1=C.H.H. | last2=Grant | first2=J.W. | title=Contribution of Methodism to Atlantic Canada | publisher=MQUP | year=1992 | isbn=978-0-7735-6322-3 | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=8wUnmKiw4vIC&pg=PA215 | access-date=2019-09-20 | page=215}}{{cite book | last=Gerson | first=C. | title=Canadian Women in Print, 1750-1918 | publisher=Wilfrid Laurier University Press | year=2010 | isbn=978-1-55458-688-2 | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=BNDfAgAAQBAJ&pg=PT240 | language=la | access-date=2019-09-20 | page=240}}{{cite book | last=Peterson | first=L.H. | title=The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women's Writing | publisher=Cambridge University Press | series=Cambridge Companions to Literature | year=2015 | isbn=978-1-107-06484-3 | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=_72TCgAAQBAJ&pg=PA194 | access-date=2019-09-20 | page=194}}

However, Herbert had poor health and her writing indicated she knew she was terminally ill. The paper she published collapsed in 1845 and Herbert died of consumption on 21 December 1846.

• Agnes Maitland, a temperance tale, (1843)
• The history of a Halifax belle, (1844)
• The Æolian harp; or, miscellaneous poems (1857)

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Category:1824 births

Category:1846 deaths

Category:19th-century Canadian newspaper publishers (people)

Category:19th-century Canadian poets

Category:19th-century Canadian women writers

Category:Canadian women poets

Category:19th-century deaths from tuberculosis

Category:Tuberculosis deaths in Canada

Category:Poets from Nova Scotia

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