Who was "Mormona"?

I’ve been doing some research on women who wrote Book of Mormon retellings in the early 20th century. I found two works by “Mormona,” who wrote two novels that were serialized in the Juvenile Instructor (an LDS church magazine which became kind of a general interest youth magazine): The Lure of the Homeland (1921) and Brother of Helam (1922). I wondered who it could be, but decided to focus on researching authors who I already knew. Luckily, this approach paid off! I doubt I’m the first person to discover her identity, but it was new to me! Her name was Ellen Heloise Day Merkley. On her FamilySearch page, there’s a memory called “Ellen Heloise Day Merkley History,” written by her daughter Elva Merkley Scott. She describes Ellen’s writing career in four brief sentences:

During her girlhood, she had discovered a talent for writing stories and poetry. She sold many thing to the Young Woman’s Journal, the Juvenile Instructor and the Relief Society Magazine. She also wrote several novels but I believe none of them sold. She wrote at first under the pseudonym “Mormona.”

image from FamilySearch

A little more summary from Elva’s biography: Ellen was born in Sanpete, Utah on October 2, 1896 and went to B.Y. High School and B.Y. Academy, where she studied to become a teacher (she’s listed as a graduate in the 1915 Banyan; she was the “Class Humorist” in the B.Y. High School Commencement Exercises and a member of the “Maestro Club” for teachers). She married Cecil Allred Merkley in January 1923, had children in December 1923 and April 1926. Her family moved to Mesa, Arizona in 1928 and was active in the LDS Church there. Ellen divorced her husband after they had been married for ten years (unusual in the 1930s) and supported herself by working as a secretary and a school teacher. She loved theater and acted in the “Mesa Little Theater.” When her children left the house she joined the Women’s Army Corps in 1944 and went to drama school in Hollywood!

She also wrote under her “real” name. Here is a list of only some of her work! Some of this is from MLCAD, and some is from work done by Kent Larsen to compile fiction about the Book of Mormon. I started searching for “Mormona” in various periodicals and there’s so much more than I expected!