For the last thirty years of his life he was the editor and publisher of The Gentlewoman, a prominent illustrated paper for women which he had founded in 1890, and he was also chairman of Press Printers Limited.
In 1891 this notion was developed further when he commissioned a serial novel called The Fate of Fenella,[6] for which twenty-four writers including Arthur Conan Doyle, Bram Stoker, and Mrs Trollope each produced one chapter "without any plan or collaboration".
[11] In 1902, the novelist Marie Corelli wrote to Wood as editor of The Gentlewoman to complain that her name had been left out of a list of the guests in the Royal Enclosure at the Braemar Highland Gathering.
Wood replied that her name had been left out intentionally, because of her own stated contempt for the press and her past objections to the snobbery of those who liked to appear in the "news puffs" of society events.
[3] Wood stated in Who's Who that he had initiated and organised schemes which had raised almost half a million pounds for a variety of philanthropic bodies,[10] which at that time was a gigantic sum.
[4] They had one son, Harold Charles Putney Wood (born 1881), and three daughters, Florence Elena Elizabeth, Ethel Violet Elise, and Mabel Fanny Louise.