During her lifetime Alice Jones enjoyed a reputation among her contemporaries as one of the leading female novelists in Canada. With her international themes, independent women characters, and insistence on Canadian content, Jones managed to win a popular readership both at home and abroad. Never as socially conscious or as ironic as her contemporary Sara Jeannette Duncan, she was nonetheless consistent in counter-pointing the vigor of wilderness landscapes and natural people against the decadence and hypocrisy of sophisticated urban civilization. A recurring interest in art and architecture also informed her novels, although it found more detailed expression in her travel sketches published in the Dominion Illustrated Monthly and the Week in the 1880s and 1890s. Jones's contributions to the Week have been described by Eva-Marie Kroller in Canadian Travellers in Europe, 1850-1900 (1987) as ranking "among the finest in Canadian travel-writing."

The daughter of Margaret Wiseman Stairs and Alfred...