Catherine Crowe

Born Catherine Ann Stevens in Borough Green, Kent, she is generally identified as an English novelist, playwright, and writer of supernatural fiction. Sources disagree on some basic dates in her life, but they do agree that she wrote across several forms and built a strong reputation in the Victorian period.

Her breakthrough as a novelist came with The Adventures of Susan Hopley, and she also published works including Men and Women, The Story of Lily Dawson, The Adventures of a Beauty, and Linny Lockwood. Her fiction often combined lively plotting with close attention to the pressures placed on women in nineteenth-century society.

Today she is especially remembered for The Night Side of Nature (1848), a hugely popular collection of ghostly and uncanny narratives. It went through many editions, was translated into several European languages, and helped shape later interest in spiritualism and supernatural literature.