Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Catherine Gore
-
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.
21
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.
30
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.
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...
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 Features
Isabella Kelly
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
Textual Features
Christian Isobel Johnstone
Johnstone's Edinburgh Magazine was heavily political in content, while Tait's was designed to have greater appeal to the general reader.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Between 1832 and 1846 (when she retired) CIJ
contributed over four hundred articles to the...
Textual Production
Christian Isobel Johnstone
She included her own work, along with that of Gore
, Mitford
, Howitt
, Mrs Fraser
, and Catherine Crowe
. Several editions appeared, up to an eleventh in 1862.
Feminist Companion Archive.
Intertextuality and Influence
Anna Brownell Jameson
An early review from the Westminster Review mentions its dislike of mixing a guide-book and a romance
Johnston, Judith. Anna Jameson: Victorian, Feminist, Woman of Letters. Scolar Press.
101
before going on to censure the author for her inadmissable lie about the authenticity of the diary....
Textual Features
Barbara Hofland
The title-page quotes Johnson
's Rambler. This novel opens with fashionable and effective abruptness: What can I do? These words, spoken in a low tone, and followed by a heart rending sigh, broke on...
Textual Production
Elizabeth Gaskell
The idea of self-improvement through writing and reading correlates to the strong emphasis in EG
's fiction on education and the impact of environment. This was undoubtedly influenced by a Unitarian intellectual background indebted to...
Textual Production
Susan Ferrier
Though her authorship of Marriage had become to some extent known, she insisted on publishing her second novel anonymously, writing to her sister that she could not bear the fuss of authorism!
LDG
was an inspiration to several of her literary peers. George Meredith
probably had her in mind in drawing his character Lady Dunstane in Diana of the Crossways. (His Lady Dunstane is a close...
Textual Features
Dinah Mulock Craik
This novel is strongly influenced by silver-fork novels published in the 1830s by authors such as Catherine Gore
.
Mitchell, Sally. Dinah Mulock Craik. Twayne.
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It plots the romances and marriages of the three cousins in the eponymous family, most...
Textual Features
Frances Power Cobbe
It is, as the subtitle Reported by Her Mistress suggests, written in the voice of the author's Pomeranian.
Cobbe, Frances Power. The Confessions of a Lost Dog. Griffith and Farran.
prelims
It thus follows the tradition of the dog narrators of Francis Coventry
's Pompey the Little...
Family and Intimate relationships
Caroline Clive
At around the age of twenty, Caroline Meysey-Wigley (later CC
) developed feelings of passionate friendship for another young woman a couple of years her senior: Catherine Moody (later the novelist Catherine Gore
). The...
Friends, Associates
Caroline Clive
CC
remained a close friend of her early passion Catherine Gore
.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
She was also acquainted with Mary Russell Mitford
, whom she described as priggy,
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
Dering, Edward Heneage, and Georgiana Chatterton. Memoirs of Georgiana, Lady Chatterton. Hurst and Blackett.
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Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.