The Dowager. A Novel.

London: Geo. Routledge & Co., Farringdon Street, New York: 10, Beekman Street. 1854. 8vo, 160 x 97 mms., pp. [ii], 306, contemporary half calf, marbled boards, black leather label; binding a little rubbed and worn, but a good copy with the armorial bookplate of Horace T. N. Meade, Trinity College Dublin on the front paste-down end-paper. Catherine Grace Frances More (née Moody, 1798 - 1861) began her literary career in her early 20s, shortly after her marriage to Lieutenant Charles Arthur Gore, by whom she had ten children, two of whom survived to adulthood. Winifred Hughes writes in ODNB, "After a succession of historical fictions during the 1820s, she came into her own with Women as they Are, or, The Manners of the Day (1830), a 'silver fork', or fashionable, novel which immediately established her as a leading practitioner of the genre. Over the next three decades she produced a great number of popular titles, many of them under the imprint of Henry Colburn, the innovative and unscrupulous publisher who was the main originator of the silver fork mode. The Colburn formula, which Gore perfected, called for scenes of aristocratic high life, set in the Regency or its aftermath and tailored to the expectations of an emerging middle-class readership. In chronicling the beau monde Gore always wrote as an insider who shared the attitudes and foibles she satirized." The present book was first published in 1836, but the sub-title is perhaps misleading to a much later generation; The Dublin Review in 1839 was enthusiastic: "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 h er stories simple, and yet not careless, and the tendency of her works almost always excellent...." The Dowager was first published in 1840 in three volumes. Referenced by: Block, A. p.87. Referenced by: Sadleir, M. 1000. Copies of this (?second) edition located in Cambridge, Reading, and TCD; also in the University of Basel.