Mrs. Catherine Ann Warfield, poet and novelist, was born at Natchez,
Mississippi, June 6, 1816, the daughter of Nathaniel H. Ware. She was
educated at Philadelphia with her sister, Eleanor P. Ware Lee
(1820-1849), with whom she afterwards collaborated in her first two
volumes. Catherine Ware was married at Cincinnati, in 1833, to Robert
Elisha Warfield, of Lexington, Kentucky, and Kentucky was her home
henceforth. _The Wife of Leon, and Other Poems, by Two Sisters of the
West_ (New York, 1844), and _The Indian Chamber, and Other Poems_ (New
York, 1846) were the works of the sisters. In 1857 Mrs. Warfield
removed from Lexington to Pewee Valley, Kentucky, near Louisville, and
some three years later her masterpiece appeared, entitled _The
Household of Bouverie_ (New York, 1860, two vols.). This work brought
her into wide notice. During the Civil War Mrs. Warfield wrote some of
the most spirited lyrics which that mighty conflict called forth.
After the war she turned again to prose fiction, producing the
following books: _The Romance of the Green Seal_ (1867); _Miriam
Monfort_ (1873); _A Double Wedding_ (1875); _Hester Howard's
Temptation_ (1875); _Lady Ernestine_ (1876); _Miriam's Memoirs_
(1876); _Sea and Shore_ (1876); _Ferne Fleming_ (1877); and her last
novel, _The Cardinal's Daughter_ (1877). Mrs. Warfield died at Pewee
Valley, Kentucky, May 21, 1877, at the time of her greatest
popularity. Of her books _The Household of Bouverie_ is the only one
that is generally known to-day, and is, perhaps, the only one that is
at all readable and interesting. Mrs. Warfield was an early edition of
"The Duchess" and Mary Jane Holmes, though she did write fine war
lyrics and one good story, which is just a bit better than either of
the other two women did.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Women of the South Distinguished in Literature_, by
Mary Forrest (New York, 1861); _Library of Southern Literature_
(Atlanta, 1910, v. xii).