Julia Catherine Hart is chiefly remembered as the author of St. Ursula's Convent (1824), according to Douglas Lochhead, "the first Canadian work of fiction written by a native-born Canadian and published in what is now Canada."

Hart was born Julia Catherine Beckwith on 10 March 1796, the daughter of Nehemiah Beckwith, a Protestant, and his wife, the former Julie-Louise Lebrun de Duplessis, who had been brought up a Roman Catholic. The Beckwith family, originally from Yorkshire, had migrated to Connecticut in the seventeenth century. About 1780 Nehemiah Beckwith, who also had relatives in Nova Scotia, moved to New Brunswick, where one of his business partners was Benedict Arnold. Julie-Louise Beckwith was the daughter of a Frenchman who had come to New France in 1755 and had stayed after it was ceded to Great Britain in 1763. When Julie-Louise married Nehemiah, she was working in Fredericton as governess to the children of Thomas Carleton, the...