Catherine Warfield

Though little known in literary circles today, Catherine Ann Warfield was a popular southern novelist in the late nineteenth century. Born in Natchez, Mississippi, in 1816, Warfield was the daughter of Major Nathaniel Ware and Sarah Percy Ellis Ware. Her mother, Sarah, was a member of the Percy line that would later produce one of the most important twentieth-century Mississippi writers: Walker Percy. The great-great-aunt of Walker Percy, Catherine Warfield is considered one of the first literarily inclined members of the family and is most often written about in conjunction with the legacy of the Percys. Warfield had a sister, Eleanor Percy Ware Lee, with whom she often wrote poetry at the beginning of her career.

The two sisters had a comfortable, yet lonely, childhood because of their mother’s mental illness. Shortly after the birth of her youngest daughter, Eleanor, Sarah suffered a rapid mental breakdown and was institutionalized. She was later moved to the attic of her oldest son’s house and never recovered from her debilitating “madness.” As a result, Catherine and Eleanor fell under the charge of their wealthy-yet-distant father who traveled often, tending to his several plantations and failing political career. Virtually alone and becoming young women, Catherine and Eleanor were nearly inseparable for the rest of their lives despite having conflicting personalities that caused them to fight. They mourned the loss of their mother, and their father’s emotional abandonment in both their personal and, eventually, literary lives.

Nathaniel Ware provided his daughters ample doweries, which included land, plantations, and slaves that he had accumulated in his career as an important member of the plantation class in both Mississippi and Texas. In 1833, at the age of seventeen, Catherine married Robert Elisha Warfield, a young horse breeder. Elisha was from a wealthy family though he himself was unambitious. The two moved to Lexington, Kentucky, and had six children together.

While Catherine lived in in Kentucky, she and Eleanor wrote to each other frequently and eventually began sharing poetry they had composed. After a time, their father encouraged (and likely funded) the publication of their first collection of poetry, The Wife of Leon and Other Poems (1844). The book received moderate praise, and in 1846 the two women published another collection titled The Indian Chamber and Other Poems. The sisters published both books anonymously as “Sisters of the West.” In their poetry, the sisters contemplated their young family life, their mother’s insanity, and wrote about love, heartbreak, personal grief, and complicated family structures.

In 1849, at the age of thirty, Eleanor died of yellow fever. Her father died of the same disease only a few years later. Distraught, Catherine briefly gave up her writing career. The financial panic of 1857 and the responsibility of caring for her niece, Sarah Dorsey (who would later also become an intellectual), forced her to begin writing again. She then began drafting what would become her most popular and most famous novel, The Household of Bouverie; or, The Elixir of Gold (1860), under the pseudonym “A Southern Lady.”

This domestic novel was written in the Gothic mode, resembling the style of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Replete with the conventions of the British Gothic, Household is deeply psychological and includes a haunted estate, otherworldly specters, a madman living in an attic, familial abuse, and even the burning of an ancestral home. In the novel, Warfield examines the power structures of marriage and concludes that submission may be the only way that women can preserve themselves in abusive relationships. While Catherine thought deeply about women’s roles and the problems embedded in the then-current form of marriage, she stops short of endorsing social change regarding women’s freedoms in the novel.

A conservative woman in all respects, Warfield was deeply connected to the southern plantation economy (aligning herself with her father and her own wealth) that influenced her loyalty to the slave-owning class. She is considered a Whig who opposed secession before the war broke out but rapidly took up a fanaticism for the Confederacy during the war and touted Lost Cause rhetoric thereafter. Initially, unlike many of her contemporary female writers, Warfield resisted sectional politics, and she nearly erased southerness from Household of Bouverie to avoid discussing slavery and political unrest. She occasionally critiqued the management of plantations but remained an ardent supporter of slavery throughout her life. Many of her postwar writings, however, displayed her obvious loyalty to the antebellum South despite her initial reluctance to politicize her writing.

Catherine Warfield died in 1877 in Kentucky, leaving behind a complicated legacy, eight novels, and the reputation of an ideal “Southern Lady.”