Alice Maud Winlow spent her adult life in Vancouver, where she was active in many cultural organizations and published poetry, fiction and plays.

Alice Maud Pickard was born in Toronto in 1878, the youngest child of John Pickard and Eunice Campbell. Very little is known of her early years. Her father was a blacksmith, and in 1881 the family of eight—parents, four girls, and two boys—were living in St. Stephen's Ward in Toronto. By 1884, Alice's mother Eunice was widowed. No death record can be found for Eunice to explain why, by 1891, Alice was living in St. Thomas Ward, listed in the census as the daughter of James Dudley (1834-1901) and Sarah Jane McLain (1834-1923), who presumably adopted her, as she took their name. None of her siblings can be found in the 1891 census, although it is possible that Annie was living as a lodger in Peel county with a farming family by the name of Neely.

Alice Pickard Dudley's adoptive father ran a publishing and printer business, Dudley & Burns. She attended the Jarvis Street Collegiate and the Toronto School of Pedagogy, and then taught mathematics at the Winchester School. A talented painter, she also studied music at the Royal Academy and the Royal College of Music in London and became a distinguished pianist, composer, and music instructor.

Alice arrived in Vancouver in 1905, the year that she married musician Frederick Jacob Newbigging Winlow (1877-1952). Childless, Alice became a leader in the fledgling cultural circles of the city, likely a result of her multi-faceted artistic abilities. Her first published work was a collection of patriotic verses——written jointly with Ernest Fewster (1877-1952) in 1914 and sold to raise money for Belgian refugees. Her second book, also a collaboration, this time with Kathryn Pocklington, was a children's story (1920). There followed another book of poems—some describing the magnificence of the western Canadian landscape—and three plays.

In addition to her executive activities in the Vancouver Branch of the Canadian Authors Association and in the Vancouver Poetry Society, Alice contributed to newspapers and periodicals in England and Canada. She was an active speaker on the club and lecture circuit, where she frequently commented on Canadian and American literature, focusing particularly on the literature of the West. Alice died in Vancouver in 1946, and was buried in Mountain View Cemetery.