About the author: Catherine Grace Frances Gore (née Moody; 12 February 1798 – 29 January 1861) was a British novelist and dramatist, daughter of a wine merchant at Retford, where she was born. She is amongst the best known of silver fork writers – authors of the "long" Regency era depicting the gentility and etiquette of high society. Gore was born in 1798 in London, the youngest child of Mary (née Brinley) and Charles Moody, a wine merchant. Her father died soon afterwards, and her mother remarried in 1801, to London physician Charles D. Nevinson. She is thus sometimes referred to as "Miss Nevinson" by contemporary reviewers and in scholarship. Catherine was interested in writing from an early age, gaining the nickname "the Poetess". She married Lieutenant Charles Arthur Gore of the 1st Regiment of Life Guards on 15 February 1823 at St George's, Hanover Square; Gore retired later that year. They had ten children, eight of whom died at a young age. They had one surviving son, Captain Augustus Frederick Wentworth Gore, and one daughter, Cecilia Anne Mary, who married Lord Edward Thynne in 1853. Her first novel, Theresa Marchmont, or The Maid of Honour, was published in 1824. Her first major success was Pin Money, published in 1831, but her most popular and well-known novel was to be Cecil, or Adventures of a Coxcomb published in 1841. Gore also found success as a playwright, writing eleven plays that made their way to the London stage, though her plays never quite became as famous as her witty novels. The Gores resided mainly on Continental Europe, with Catherine supporting her family by her voluminous writings. Between 1824 and 1862 she produced about 70 works, the most successful of which were novels of fashionable English life. Among these may be mentioned Manners of the Day (1830), Cecil, or the Adventures of a Coxcomb (1841), and The Banker's Wife (1843). She also wrote for the stage, and composed music for songs. Gore's 1861 obituary in The Times concluded that Gore was "the best novel writer of her class and the wittiest woman of her age." Mrs. Gore's Cecil; or, The Adventures of a Coxcomb and its sequel Cecil, a Peer, both published anonymously in 1841, came toward the end of the long run of the socalled silver fork or fashionable novels, which capitalized on middle-class fascination with the aristocratic Regency. Under cover of a masculine first-person narrator Gore was able to give free rein to the whole complex of attitudes and values associated with the by now discredited Regency and its ascendent ruling class. Although she satirizes high society, she shows good-humored indulgence toward her unregenerate dandy as well as misgivings about the emerging middle-class Victorian cult of seriousness and sincerity. Gore's ambivalent thematic burden-her portrayal of the dandy's allure and degeneration-exerts tremendous pressure on her narrative form. Like most of the silver fork writers, Gore sidesteps the conventional novelistic patterns of social and economic rise as irrelevant to her aristocratic hero, while she self-cousciously attempts to evade plot altogether, particularly closure. Early Victorian critics and readers appear to have been considerably less receptive to Gore's themes and techniques than the popular audience of a decade earlier. #hardcover#history#classic#womenauthors#victorian#silverfork#aristocrat

ISBN: 9781359207777