Catherine Grace Frances Moody, novelist and song writer, daughter of an English wine seller, was born in 1799 in East Radford, Nottinghamshire, England. She was educated at home and in 1823 was married to Captain Charles Arthur Gore (a good name for an army man!). She was very productive and wrote seventy or eighty novels and had ten children. Many of her books were stories of so-called English "high society" life. In 1832 she went to France and lived there for many years. Later she became blind, returned to England, and lived in Hampshire until her death in 1861.

REFERENCES: Allibone, Dict. Eng. Lit.; Kunitz and Haycraft, British Authors, 255; J. Cordy Jeaffreson, Novels and Novelists from Elizabeth to Victoria, London, 1858, II, 354-56.

Waverley Library (quarto). No. 128