Catherine Grace Frances Gore (1799–1867), née Moody, was born in Retford, Nottinghamshire. She wrote a great number of books, about 70 between 1824 and 1861, and was a novelist of the 'silver fork school', or 'fashionable novel', a genre of which Theodore Edward Hook was the most successful writer, and which thrived between about 1825 and 1850. In his essay 'The Dandy School', William Hazlitt dismisses them as pandering to 'the admiration of the folly, caprice, insolence, and affectation of a certain class'. Thackeray satirizes these novels, and M. W. Rosa, in The Silver-Fork School (1936), claims that the genre's greatest achievement is Thackeray's Vanity Fair!
This end of the sarcophagus mentions Gore's husband Charles Arthur Gore. Catherine Gore is self-effacingly called 'Mrs Arthur Gore' in the link to her novel below, and was also known as plain 'Mrs Gore'.
The grave of Julia Pardoe (1806–62), Catherine Gore's friend, is just a few paces away, although the stone has fallen and the inscription is illegible. Pardoe came from Beverley, Yorkshire, wrote historical books and had a strong knowledge of Turkey and France. There are links to her The Life of Marie de Medicis trilogy below.
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Theresa Marchmont; or, the Maid of Honour, by Mrs. Charles Gore
The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 1 (of 3), by Julia Pardoe
The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3), by Julia Pardoe
The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 3 (of 3), by Julia Pardoe
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