Agnes Ethelwyn Wetherald, based in southern Ontario, enjoyed a long and admired career as a poet and journalist.

Known for her journalism and poetry, Agnes Ethelwyn Wetherald was born into a Quaker family in Rockwood, ON, the sixth of eleven children. At the age of seven she moved with her family to Philadelphia, PA, where the family lived for two years while her father was superintendent of Haverford College, and later to a fruit and dairy farm at Chantler, ON, near Fenwick on the Niagara Peninsula, where he became a Quaker minister. Here, Ethelwyn spent the majority of her life. She was educated at the Friends Boarding School in Union Springs, NY, and at Pickering College in Ontario. Her egalitarian Quaker upbringing fostered her progressive views about the role of women, often expressed in her writing.

Her first poem was published when she was seventeen, in , followed by stories in from 1880 to 1882. Her journalistic career began in earnest in 1886, when she began to use the pen name "Bel Thistlethwaite" for her essays and sketches in the , a pseudonym originating with the maiden name of her paternal grandmother. She also became a regular contributor to over the next three years, which published her poetry and a series of articles on Canadian literary women. During this time, she collaborated with Graeme Mercer Adam on her only extensive work of fiction, (1886), an historical romance that later became an embarrassment on account of its sentimental portrayal of Aboriginal life. Another novel, was advertised as “preparing for early publication” in the flyleaves of , but this novel appears never to have been published.

At the invitation of John Cameron, Ethelwyn moved to London, ON, in 1889 to write for the and for the somewhat feminist monthly . Over the following years she became a prolific contributor to various North American periodicals; her many poems in the became the basis of her first book of poetry, (1895). In 1895, she became editorial assistant on the and then worked with Charles Dudley Warner and Forrest Morgan on , possibly moving to Hartford, CT, for this position.

After living for several years in St. Paul, she returned to Fenwick and her family's farm. Here she found new inspiration and produced three books of poetry in the first decade of the twentieth century. Remaining unmarried, she adopted a young girl named Dorothy (b. 1911), who at the writing this entry (May 2016), was still living; Dorothy later went on to publish her own compilation of memories of Ethelwyn's life. In addition to writing an introduction to Isabella Valancy Crawford’s (1905), Ethelwyn was friends with many literary figures such as Laura Durand, Helena Coleman, and Marjorie Pickthall. Ethelwyn died in 1940, just short of her eighty-third birthday, and was buried in Pelham.