Catherine Crowe

Catherine Ann Crowe, née Stevens, (20 September 1803 in Borough Green, Kent – 14 June 1876 in Folkestone), was an English novelist, story writer and playwright, who also wrote for children.

Crowe was educated at home, spending most her childhood in Kent. She married an army officer, Major John Crowe (1783–1860). They had a son, John William (born 1823), but the marriage was an unhappy one, and when she met Sydney Smith and his family at Clifton, Bristol in 1828, she asked them for their help. Little is known about the next few years, but by 1838 she was separated from her husband, living in Edinburgh, and had made the acquaintance of several writers, including the impecunious Thomas de Quincey, and in London Harriet Martineau and William Makepeace Thackeray. Smith was also an encouragement to her in her writing. Her success waned somewhat in the later 1850s and she sold her copyrights in 1861. After 1852, she lived mainly in London and abroad, but she moved to Folkestone in 1871, where she died the following year.

Crowe's two plays, the verse tragedy Aristodemus (1838) and the melodrama The Cruel Kindness (1853) both had historical themes paralleling her own family problems. Both were published and the second also had a short run in London in 1853.

The book that established Crowe as a novelist was The Adventures of Susan Hopley (1841). It was followed by Men and Women (1844), the well-received The Story of Lily Dawson (1847), The Adventures of a Beauty (1852), and Linny Lockwood (1854). Though set in middle-class life, they had complicated, sensational plots, while also commenting on the predicaments of Victorian women brought up in seclusion to be mistreated by men. This aspect of her writing was emphasised particularly by later women writers in an appreciation in Women Novelists of Queen Victoria's Reign (1897). Susan Hopley was reprinted many times, and to her annoyance, dramatised and turned into a penny serial. Her stories were also in demand from periodicals such as the weekly Chambers' Edinburgh Journal and Dickens's Household Words.

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