atherine Grace Frances Moody Gore was born in London in 1799, the daughter
of C. Moody, and raised in East Retford, Notthinghamshire, and London. In 1823
she married Captain Charles Arthur Gore and in the same year published The
Broken Hearts, a verse story, which was followed in 1824 by her first
novel, Theresa Marchment, of The Maid of Honour. A prolific
writer, Catherine Gore continued to turn out novels as well as plays at an amazing
rate. With Women As They Are, or Manners of the Day (1830),
she entered the genre of the silver-fork novel, a much maligned form of fiction
that focuses on the depiction of high society, especially of Regency England,
anticipating the twentieth-century Regency Romance. Gore's novels have consequently
been compared to Jane Austen's novels and her later imitators such as Susan
Ferrier as well as to the various writers of silver-fork novels that proliferated
in the early Victorian age such as Bulwer-Lytton
and Mrs Trollope.
In 1832 Catherine Gore moved to Paris and only returned to England after nine years. She continued to write fiction, producing her best known novel Cecil, or Adventures of a Coxcomb and its sequel, Cecil, a Peer, both published in 1841. In the same year she also began a series of articles in Bentley's Miscellany under the pseudonym "Albany Poyntz". In 1843 Gore won a prize for her comedy Quid Pro Quo, or the Day of Dupes. When she fell victim to a bank scandal in 1855 she reissued her 1843 novel about a corrupt banker, The Banker's Wife, or Court and City, which testifies to her resourcefulness as well as to her relentless exposure of hypocrisy, for which she was often censured at the time. Catherine Gore died in 1861.
Last modified 2 December 2002