ABSTRACT
Catherine (or Catharine) Jane Hamilton (c. 1841-1935) was an Irish novelist, born in Dublin, the younger daughter of the Revd Richard Hamilton, and his wife, Charlotte. Her novels and short tales (some published by the Religious Tract and Christian Knowledge Societies) included Dr Belton’s Daughters (1890), The Merry-go-Round (1894), and A Flash of Youth (1900); she also wrote short plays intended for ‘drawing-room performance’, such as The Four-Leaved Shamrock: A Comedy in Three Acts. Her non-fiction included Memorable Irishwomen (1904), Famous Love-Matches (Illustrated) (1908), some reviewing for Temple Bar, Macmillan’s and Comhill Magazines, and a series of autobiographical articles, originally published in an illustrated magazine called The Treasury in 1918-19, but recently reprinted as Growing up in Kilmersdon: Recollections of a Girl 150 years ago (Kilmersdon: Stephen Powys Marks, 1999). In it she describes growing up in a coal-mining district of Somerset with her intellectual clergyman father, who taught her Latin and Greek, but gradually went deaf and blind from a tapeworm infection; and her bright and vivacious Irish mother, who wanted her to learn accomplishments and be happy ‘If I had lived in the present day I should probably have wanted to go to Girton or Newnham, but such places were then unknown,’ she says in her Recollections (p. 267). She briefly mentions Gaskell, whose delightful Cranford’ she enjoyed reading.
