Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Catherine Gore
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Standard Name: Gore, Catherine
Birth Name: Catherine Grace Frances Moody
Married Name: Catherine Grace Frances Gore
Nickname: the Poetess
Pseudonym: Albany Poyntz
Pseudonym: The Authoress of The Manners of the Day
CG
wrote during the earlier nineteenth century, for needed cash to help support her family.
Baird, Rebecca Lynne Russell. Catherine Frances Gore, the Silver-Fork School, and "Mothers and Daughters": True Views of Society in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain. University of Arkansas.
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Her publications over more than three decades totalled above 70 titles running to 200 volumes:
Gore, Catherine. “Introduction”. Gore on Stage: The Plays of Catherine Gore, edited by John Franceschina, Garland, pp. 1-34.
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poetry, plays (though not all her eleven plays performed on the London stage were published), tales, and more particularly novels. She also edited a gift book and contributed articles to magazines. Many of her novel titles flag their particular interest for women readers. Many have European (often historical) settings. Those set in London show sharp awareness of its social stratification, the gulf between fashionable and non-fashionable addresses or accessories, the careless arrogance of those at the top, the snobbish, humiliating struggle of those not quite at the top. Many dramatise the conflict between old and new money, in which the central female figure serves as object of symbolic exchange, as trophy wife. A leading silver-fork novelist, CG
kept up her attention to issues of class after the silver-fork moment ended.
The title positions the novel in a line running from Robert Bage
's Man As He Is, 1792, and William Godwin
's Caleb Williams; or, Things as They Are, 1794, to Catherine Gore
Friends, Associates
L. E. L.
By the time LEL began living alone, she was well-known in literary circles. She became a good friend of Emma Roberts
and Rosina Bulwer-Lytton
around this time, and gradually became a recognized London public figure...
Textual Production
Alethea Lewis
AL
's dedication to Sir Edward Littleton
, Member of Parliament for Stafford, praises him in this capacity and as a landlord. Her subscribers include many friends or relations, as well as writers like...
Leisure and Society
Eliza Lynn Linton
In London, Eliza Lynn drank in artistic life. She championed the singing of Jenny Lind
against those who preferred Alboni or Malibran. She performed for Samuel Laurence
the role of uninformed art critic or foolometer...
Textual Features
Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington
In the plot, Jim is suspected in the murder of a policeman, but later becomes sensibly disillusioned with repeal. Grace improves her natural goodness by reading the Bible in an almost Protestant manner. She ministers...
Intertextuality and Influence
Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington
The elderly lady, Lady Arabella, represents a chilly view of the English aristocracy. She opens her story with a paean in praise of past times and in dispraise of the present: How interminably long the...
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Kadar
credits Pardoe and Catherine Gore
as the first British writers to observe the modern form of nationalism that was emerging in Hungary in the mid-nineteenth...
This appears to be her first published work. Its contents are Biography of a Spaniel (which sounds like a forerunner of The Story of a Royal Favourite by Catherine Gore
, 1845), The Mask,...
Friends, Associates
Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan
In London in 1824 she had a socially unsuccessful meeting with Wordsworth
, who was by now a thorough reactionary in politics. He went to some pains to snub her; she refused to notice this...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan
She developed her case in several important reviews of 1839-40, including her notice of Catherine Gore
's The Dowager. She draws a parallel between authorship and other manufacturing trades, among which, however, authorship is...
Textual Production
Annie Tinsley
AT
, as the author of Margaret; or, Prejudice at Home, published a novel with a female first-person protagonist, Women as They Are. By One of Them.
The title of Women as They...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Flora Tristan
One chapter, entitled English Women, criticizes British social systems, and details the consequences women suffer because of the indissolubility of marriage.
Tristan, Flora. Flora Tristan’s London Journal, 1840. Translators Palmer, Dennis and Giselle Pincetl, Charles River Books.