Catherine Anne Warfield - Literary Career

Literary Career

In the 1830s, Catherine spent her summers in Natchez with her sister and recently relocated mother, who was staying with her son Thomas George Ellis, from her first marriage. In the 1840s, together the two sisters composed and refined the poetry which they later published through printers commissioned by their father. There was quite a literary community in Natchez, and other women encouraged the sisters' work.

In the mid-1850s, Catherine was encouraged to start writing again by her niece Sarah Ellis, already a successful novelist. In 1860 Warfield published anonymously as "A Southern Lady," The Household of Bouverie, a gothic fiction in two volumes. It achieved great popular success. The story tells of a young orphan who comes from England to live with her grandmother in America. The young woman encounters her grandfather Erastus Bouverie, long presumed dead, living in secret on the second floor. He has become a reclusive mad man attempting to create a youth-restoring potion. The story deals with their relationship, and the unfolding narrative of a dark and torrid family history. Warfield was praised as "Shakespearean," and one contemporary writer said, "Of living female authors, we can openly class Mrs. Warfield with George Sand and George Eliot." The novel met with strong reception.

After the Civil War, Warfield published eight more novels, all under her own name. The two most popular were Ferne Fleming (1877) and its sequel The Cardinal’s Daughter (1877); however, no work gained the same degree of success as her first novel.

She died in 1877.

Walker Percy's novel Lancelot bears a resemblance to The Household of Bouverie. Despite Walker's disclaimer, both the Percy biographer Bertram Wyatt-Brown and his nephew William Armstrong Percy, III believe that he based the novel, so different from his others, on his predecessor's work.