Ella Wallace Manning (1906–2007)

Ella Wallace Jackson Manning was born Oct. 26, 1906, in Mill Village, near Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia, Canada. In 1930, she became one of the first women to graduate from Dalhousie University, Halifax, earning a Bachelor of Arts degree with distinction in history and Latin. Three years later, she graduated from the School of Nursing at Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal. She first met Thomas Henry Manning, the Arctic explorer and biologist, in 1935 on a voyage from Canada to England. Three years later, he proposed to her via telegram and she sailed on an icebreaker to join him at Cape Dorset at the southern tip of Baffin Island. They were married the day after her arrival. They spent the next couple of years traveling, living, and hunting with Inuit people, which led to Ella's first book, Igloo for the Night (1943). Between 1940 and 1941, they made an epic journey by boat and dog team of nearly 4550 kilometers, during which they traversed the entire Foxe Basin coast. Ella accompanied her husband as an assistant on a Canadian Geodetic Service surveying party in Ungava Peninsula in 1946, after which she wrote Summer on Hudson Bay (1949). For many years, she typed all her husband's manuscripts and catalogued his large Arctic library.

They separated after 29 years, and Ella settled in Ottawa.
She died of congestive heart failure in Ottawa on Sept. 25, 2007, a month short of her 101st birthday.