Major Works
Novels
- The Cardinal’s Daughter. Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson & Brothers, 1877.
- Ferne Fleming, a Novel. Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson & Brothers, 1877.
- Miriam’s Memoirs. Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson & Brothers, 1876.
- Sea and Shore. Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson and Brothers, 1876.
- A Double Wedding; or, How She Won. Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson & Brothers, 1875.
- Hester Howard’s Temptation: a Soul’s Story. Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson and Brothers, 1875.
- Lady Ernestine, or, The Absent Lord of Rochefort. Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson & Brothers, 1875.
- Miriam Monfort, A Novel. New York: Appleton, 1873.
- The Romance of Beauseincourt: An Episode. New York: G. W. Carleton & Co., 1867.
- The Romance of the Green Seal. New York: Beadle & Co., 1866.
- The Household of Bouverie, or The Elixir of Gold. New York: Derby & Jackson, 1860.
Poetry
- You Can Never Win Us Back. Lyrics. Music by J. E. Smith. J. W. Davies & Sons, 1864.
- The Indian Chamber, and Other Poems. (with Eleanor P. Lee) New York: Derby & Jackson, 1846.
- The Wife of Leon, and Other Poems by Two Sisters of the West. (with Eleanor P. Lee) Cincinnati: E. Morgan & Co., 1843.
Biography of Catherine Warfield
Catherine Ann (Ware) Warfield, born on June 6, 1816 in Natchez, Mississippi, was the daughter of Sarah Percy and Nathaniel Ware. Her father, a banker, died of yellow fever in 1854 near Galveston, Texas. As a Southern writer of poetry and fiction, she and her sister Eleanor are the first in the line of writers from the Percy family in Mississippi. (In the twentieth century,William Alexander Percy and Walker Percy have become well-known authors).
She was raised in Philadelphia where her mother was hospitalized for post-partum depression after Eleanor’s birth. Catherine and her sister Eleanor Percy Ware Lee composed poetry at an early age and published (before the Civil War and with their father’s help), two volumes using the pen name “The Two Sisters of the West.” The works were entitled The Wife of Leon and Other Poems (1843) and The Indian Chamber and Other Poems (1846).
Catherine married Robert Elisha Warfield in 1833 at the age of seventeen. They lived at Grasmere, near Lexington, Kentucky, until 1857 and had six children, but in the summers Catherine visited her sister and her mother. Eleanor died in 1849, and Catherine stopped writing due to her sorrow. She began writing again in the mid 1850’s. She published anonymously in 1860 (calling herself “A Southern Lady”) a two-volume, gothic, fictional work called The Household of Bouverie, or the Elixir of Gold, which became very popular.
Although Kentucky did not secede from the Union, Warfield supported the Confederacy through her poetry. She crafted poems that expressed her dedication to the cause of the Confederacy which were published in newspapers throughout the South. Several of these poems were then included in a book published in 1867, entitled Southern Poems of the War.
In addition to her poetry, Warfield crafted the lyrics for a song celebrating the efforts of Confederate Colonel Mosby and his men. It was entitled You Can Never Win Us Back.
When the Civil War ended, Warfield wrote eight additional novels under her own name. The Household of Bouverie remained her most successful novel.
She died in 1877.
Related Websites
- Poems by the Sisters of the West on American Verse Project includes text of poems titled A Valley of Virginia, Lines, The Palaces of Araby, and Bury Her with Her Shining Hair. Part of the University of Michigan Humanities Text Initiative
- Gutenberg has Miriam Monfort and Sea and Shore by Warfield online to read in entirety
- Entry for Catharine Ann Ware Warfield in Lives of Mississippi Authors, 1817-1967
- Kentucky in American Letters, 1784-1912, Vol. 1 has entry for Warfield