| Main entry | Herring, Frances |
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| Birth place | King's Lynn, Norfolk, England |
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| Birth date | 15 October 1846 |
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| Death place | New Westminster, British Columbia |
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| Death date | 17 November 1916 |
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| Identifier | 0005 |
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| Birth name | Frances Elizabeth Herring |
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| Married name | Herring |
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| Marital status | married |
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| Religious affiliation | Anglican |
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| Paid work | teacher (school); journalist |
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| Biography | Born in King's Lynn, UK, and educated in Reading as a teacher, Frances Herring (1846-1916) and her husband Arthur Herring (1851-1941), who was also her first cousin, were prominent British Columbian pioneers. Although her 1874 departure from her family had been tumultuous, Frances established a flourishing and stable life with Arthur on the Canadian West Coast. She was certified as a teacher by the British Columbia Board of Education in July 1875, and taught Aboriginal children at the school in Fort Langley until 1878, when she joined her husband in New Westminster, where he had set up a drug store. When not vacationing at their summer residence on the American side of Boundary Bay, Arthur worked at building a fortune from pharmacy, mining, real estate and electricity investments in the city of New Westminster. He also sat on the New Westminster City Council, while Frances raised their children. Deeply interested in the unfolding of Western Canadian society and a supporter of women's suffrage, she used her literary talents to record and broadcast information about the history, conditions and people of British Columbia. Most of her books and her articles and stories in the GLOBE and Canadian, British, and American magazines are expositions of West Coast life. Pioneering, the gold rush, and the ordeal of westward migration provide the themes and settings of her stories of historical adventure. Between 1900 and 1914, she published six novels of pioneer life, which were sold both by publishers and from her New Westminster home. She became increasingly involved in journalism during the last decades of the nineteenth century, editing the "Home Circle" of New Westminster's BRITISH COLUMBIA COMMONWEALTH in 1892 and writing for the TORONTO GLOBE, possibly serving as their British Columbia correspondent for a time. An active member of political and philanthropic organizations such as the Royal Columbian Hospital Women's Auxiliary, the National Council of Women of Canada, and the Woman's Auxiliary to the Missionary Society of the Church of England in Canada, she encouraged the government to spend more money on education rather than prison systems, and worked towards fostering closer relations between Canada and England. Frances Herring continued to write until her death from diabetes in 1916. |
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| Residences | King's Lynn, Norfolk, England (1846, 1851); Terrington St. Clement, Norfolk, England (1861, 1871); Fort Langley, British Columbia (c1874-1878); New Westminster, British Columbia (1878-1916) |
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| Geographic regions | British Columbia |
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| Primary genres | fiction; non-fiction |
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| Books | CANADIAN CAMP LIFE (1900); AMONG THE PEOPLE OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (1903); IN THE PATHLESS WEST WITH SOLDIERS, PIONEERS, MINERS, AND SAVAGES (1904); ENA (1913); NAN AND OTHER PIONEER WOMEN OF THE WEST (1913); THE GOLD MINERS (1914) |
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| Periodicals | BRITISH COLUMBIA COMMONWEALTH; CANADIAN MAGAZINE; ENGLISH MAGAZINE; TORONTO GLOBE |
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| Organizations | National Council of Women of Canada; Royal Columbian Hospital Women's Auxiliary; Woman's Auxiliary to the Missionary Society of the Church of England in Canada |
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| Other arts | music (organ, choir) |
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| Father's name | Jonathan J. Herring |
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| Life dates of father | c1815 - c1860 |
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| Father's note | merchant; fruiterer |
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| Mother's name | Harriet Clarke |
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| Life dates of mother | c1821, Lynn, Norfolk, England - after 1901 |
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| Mother's note | market gardener; pauper (after husband's death); may have married again, as possible that step-father contributed to Frances's departure from England |
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| Spouse 1 | Arthur May Herring |
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| Life dates of spouse 1 | 2 May 1851, England - 29 May 1941, New Westminster, British Columbia |
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| Spouse 1 note | chemist and druggist; New Westminster real estate, City Council; offspring of Royal Engineers, arrived in B.C. in 1858 |
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| Marriage 1 date | 27 December 1874 |
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| Marriage 1 place | Sapperton (New Westminster), British Columbia |
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| Children number | 8 |
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| Children's names and dates | Arthur Francis Charles (29 October 1875 - ), m. Emily Margaret McGuire, Martha Irwin;
George Edward May (11 May 1877 - 10 September 1888);
John Victor Paul (11 November 1878 - 13 September 1950), m. to Dora Jane Stobart;
Henry William Stanley (16 April 1881 - 16 October 1881);
Earnest Adam W ? (1882 - 23 December 1882);
Alexander May (13 December 1884 - 9 March 1885);
Mabel Harriet Frances (11 November 1887 - after 1917), m. Dr. George Thomas Wilson;
Philip Sydney (22 November 1891 - 15 March 1966), m. Sarah Anne Tidy |
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| Biographical references | Buckner, Phillip and R. Douglas Francis, REDISCOVERING THE BRITISH WORLD (2005); Lockhart, Pamela (Wilson) and Patricia Wilson "Frances Elizabeth Herring: A Woman of Letters," GRACE, GRIT, AND GUSTO, ed. June Harrison and Margaret Fairweather (2012); Perry, "Herring, Frances Elizabeth (Herring)," DICTIONARY OF CANADIAN BIOGRAPHY XIV, University of Toronto/Université Laval (Web, 2000); 1851 England Census; 1861 England Census; 1871 England Census; 1881 Census of Canada; 1891 Census of Canada; British Columbia Death Index: 1872 to 1979; British Columbia Marriage Index: 1872 to 1924; England & Wales, FreeBMD Birth Index, 1837-1915; special thanks to Ken McIntosh for research contributions |
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| Bibliographic references | Watters, CHECKLIST OF CANADIAN LITERATURE...1620-1960 (1970), pp. 310, 965 |
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| Research references | complete |
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| Image credits | Image from Frances E. Herring, THE GOLD MINERS (London: Griffiths, 1914) frontispiece. |
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| Copyright | This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/. Please cite Canada's Early Women Writers. SFU Library Digital Collections. Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada. 1980-2014. |
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