Catherine Ann Warfield

Catharine Ann Warfield was actively engaged in writing prior to the Civil War. Born Catherine Ann Ware on June 6, 1816, in Natchez, Mississippi, Warfield and her younger sister, Eleanor, were raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, after their mother was institutionalized shortly after Eleanor’s birth. Provided with an education that was closely supervised by her father, Warfield married, at age sixteen, into a prominent Kentucky family. In the early 1840s, Warfield and her sister produced two books of poetry. The first, The Wife of Leon, and Other Poems by Two Sisters of the West, published in 1843, attracted the attention and praise of William Cullen Bryant and others. The second, The Indian Chamber, and Other Poems, was dedicated to Bryant and was published in 1846.

Very little information is available about Catherine Warfield's personal life. Diaries and correspondence, if extant, have not been recoverable to date. Little is known of her marriage to Robert Elisha Warfield except that they, and their family of six children, resided in the Lexington, Kentucky, area until 1857, when they moved, due to financial difficulties, to a farm near Louisville. However, throughout her novels, a motif of domestic violence exists that calls into question the tranquility of the Warfield marriage. It is also known that Warfield was a slave owner and, through land speculations by her father, inherited considerable property in Texas.

In 1860, eleven years after the death of her sister, Catherine Warfield published her first novel, The Household of Bouverie, or the Elixir of Gold. Written in the tradition of Gothic fiction, this romance elicited a favorable review from Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in which it was proclaimed for its “unquestionable imaginative power” (838). Warfield was complimented by the reviewer as “a female novel-writer who displays the unmistakable fire of genius, however terrific its brightness” (839).

This “fire of genius,” however, was temporarily doused as the outbreak of the Civil War shifted Warfield’s attention, and the nation’s, to the conflict being played out on the battlefield. Although her adopted state did not secede from the Union, Warfield took up her poet’s pen in support of the Confederacy. During the war, she wrote several poems, which were published in various southern newspapers, expressing her commitment to the southern cause. In 1864, Warfield wrote the lyrics for a “patriotic song,” entitled “You Can Never Win Us Back,” which was dedicated to “Mosby and his men.” Several of Warfield’s poems celebrating the southern cause were included in Southern Poems of the War, published in 1867.

While little is known of her personal life, Warfield’s literary record is impressive. In 1866, she published her second novel, The Romance of the Green Seal, a short fiction about an abused southern wife who carries on a secret correspondence with an unknown admirer of her poetry. In 1867, she extracted a portion of a much longer work in progress and published it as Beauseincourt: An Episode. This novel is written more in the vein of the “plantation novel” and represents a significant shift in thematic emphasis for Warfield. Set in Georgia in the late 1850s, Beauseincourt was Warfield’s initial entry into the realm of historical fiction.

Not until 1873 did Warfield publish again, revising the Beauseincourt story and rejoining it to the earlier excised material to tell the complete story of Miriam Monfort. Between 1875 and her death in 1877, Catherine Warfield published seven other works of fiction: Hester Howard's Temptation, A Double Wedding, Lady Ernestine, or The Absent Lord of Rocheforte, Miriam’s Memoirs, Sea and Shore, A Sequel to ‘Miriam’s Memoirs,’ Ferne Fleming, A Novel, and The Cardinal’s Daughter, A Sequel to ‘Ferne Fleming.’ Of these latter novels, only Lady Ernestine and Ferne Fleming are historically based, the former set in revolutionary France and the later, like The Romance of Beauseincourt, set in the pre-war American South. These later works attracted little critical interest.

(Article first posted May 1998)