Mrs. Armytage

Catherine Grace Frances Gore (Moody) (1799 – January 29, 1861) was a British novelist and dramatist, daughter of a wine merchant at Retford, where she was born. She is amongst the well-known of the silver fork writers - authors of the Victorian era depicting the gentility and etiquette of high society. "Of her private life, there is little to be told. We have heard that she was a Miss Nevinson. We know that an officer gave her the name by which she will be recollected,—that her married life included prolonged residence on the Continent, and literary labour of a quantity which it is bewildering to think of. Her first novels, The Hungarian Tales, and TheTuileries (a really good novel of the French Revolution, ere M. Dumas was thought of), promised a romancer of no common order.—But shortly after their appearance had made their author known, "the silver fork" broke out; and people grew insanely curious to know what happened at Almack's. She had observation of character —witness her Mrs. Armytage; she had an adroit power of masking—witness 'Cecil, a book which, for its week deceived London,—a book which, coming after some forty novels by the same hand, contrived to beguile the majority of readers into the idea that a new, dashing Unknown had burst into literature." (The Athenaeum, No. 1737, February 9, 1861)


Contemporary Review

We consider Mrs. Gore to be one of the most elegant and unexceptionable of the female writers of the present day; her style is easy and graceful, the plot of her stories simple, and yet not careless, and the tendency of her works almost always excellent;—professedly a moral writer, she has not marred her own purpose by taking a too ambitious line. Although she has drawn occasionally from the store-house of wily priests, gloomy superiors, ike. &c. without which few Protestants can make out a story, and which are really as tempting resources as ever were the genii and fairies of olden time, yet she has not systematically meddled with any one's creed, nor dived into the deep recessess of the human heart for pictures of crime and anguish, but has contented herself with delineating, with truth and delicacy, those lighter shades of character by which society is checquered. In her fine appreciation of character, we are reminded of Miss Austen. Decidedly the best of her novels is Mrs. Armytage. (The Dublin Review, 1839)