Catherine Fanshawe

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CF wrote mostly in the early nineteenth century, though she began before the end of the old century. She composed private poems and letters (of which only a tiny proportion survive); sophisticated, high-spirited, sharp-tongued parodies; political commentary in poetry; and verse jokes, often at the expense of established writers. Her high reputation during her lifetime was entirely that of an amateur, and so did not long survive.

Milestones

6 July 1765

CF was born at her father's estate, Shabden at Chipstead in Surrey; she was the middle one in a family of three sisters; one brother died very young and the other as a young man.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.

1801

CF composed what eventually became one of the best-known of her little-known poems; it was later entitled Epistle to Earl Harcourt , on his wishing her to spell the name of Catherine with a K.
Fanshawe, Catherine. Memorials of Miss Catherine Maria Fanshawe. Editor Harness, William, Privately printed by Vacher and Sons.
1

March 1833

Catherine Fanshawe wrote two political verse satires which appeared anonymously in the Morning Post: Provision for a Family and Speech of the Member for Odium.
Provision for a Family had already appeared alone in 1830.
Baillie, Joanna. The Collected Letters of Joanna Baillie. Editor Slagle, Judith Bailey, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
2: 1211
OCLC WorldCat. http://www.oclc.org/firstsearch/content/worldcat/. Accessed 1999.

14 April 1834

CF died at nearly seventy while staying at Putney Heath; she had suffered badly for months from a disease of the spine.
The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography gives her death-date as the 17th.
Baillie, Joanna. The Collected Letters of Joanna Baillie. Editor Slagle, Judith Bailey, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
2: 1211, 646-7

Biography

Birth and Family

6 July 1765

CF was born at her father's estate, Shabden at Chipstead in Surrey; she was the middle one in a family of three sisters; one brother died very young and the other as a young man.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.