Catharine Colace Ross, who flourished in Scotland during the late seventeenth century, is known as a spiritual autobiographer; in fact the contents of her Memoirs show that throughout her lifetime she used writing as a tool for private and public analysis.

The date of CCR's birth (probably at Edinburgh in the earlier seventeenth century, into a family of several children) is not known. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography suggests about 1635, though this year would make her barely fifteen at her marriage.