[1] Sheard was born in Cobourg, Canada West, the daughter of Elizabeth Butler and Eldridge Stanton, a photographer.

[1] Her brother Eldridge Stanton Jr. and his wife both died at Niagara Falls, in the Ice Bridge Disaster of 1912.

She wrote her first books, Trevelyan's Little Daughters (1898) and A Maid of Many Moods (1902) to entertain her sons.

[2] Her adult fiction was written mainly in the romance genre and included, By the Queen's Grace (1904; a romance set in Elizabethan London), The Man at Lone Lake (1912), The Golden Apple Tree (1920), Below the Salt (1936), and Leaves in the Wind (1938).

Below the Salt is a melodramatic story of Marcus O'Sullivan, a wealthy Ontario farmer.