Virginia Sheard, born on April 24, 1862, in Cobourg, Canada West, was a Canadian poet and novelist. She was the daughter of Elizabeth Butler and Eldridge Stanton, a photographer with United Empire Loyalist roots. Sheard spent her childhood in Toronto, and her brother Eldridge Stanton Jr. tragically died in the Ice Bridge Disaster of 1912 at Niagara Falls. She began publishing her poems and stories in 1898 and wrote her first books to entertain her sons, including Trevelyan’s Little Daughters (1898) and A Maid of Many Moods (1902). Her adult fiction largely focused on the romance genre, with notable works such as By the Queen’s Grace (1904), The Man at Lone Lake (1912), and Below the Salt (1936). Sheard also published five volumes of poetry, often exploring religious themes, with works like The Miracle and Other Poems (1913) and Carry On! (1917). Her poem “The Young Knights” is regarded as one of Canada’s literary responses to World War I. Sheard passed away on February 22, 1943.