Catherine Eliza Richardson

Catherine Eliza Richardson (née Scott 24 November 1777 – 9 October 1853; often called Caroline Eliza Richardson, and published as Mrs. G. G. Richardson) was a Scottish author and poet who published a four-volume novel and three collections of verse.

Biography Catherine Eliza Richardson was born in 1777 to Phoebe Scott (née Dixon) and James Scott, a landowner of considerable property and Justice of the peace in the Scottish borders village of Canonbie, Dumfriesshire. She is described being 'born into favourable circumstances' as one of a 'numerous family of brothers and sisters', of 'educated and intellectual' parents.

Her childhood was spent in the borders, but in 1799 she travelled to India, where on 29 April at Fort George, Madras she married her cousin Gilbert Geddes Richardson, a mariner, captain of an East Indiaman and partner in a trading house, Colt, Baker, Hart & Co. Her connection with India is specified as her uncle, 'General, afterwards Lord Harris'.

She quickly had five children with Gilbert;

Richardson was an intimate of Thomas Carlyle, who in his Reminiscences remarks on her as 'poor and hospitable Mrs. Richardson, once a "novelist" of mark, much of a gentlewoman and loved by us both.'

Works Richardson's first-published work is thought to be the 1801 four-volume novel Adonia - A Desultory Story; her authorship rests on strong circumstantial evidence - the published volumes omits the author's name.

She published poems in a short-lived London Weekly Review (LWR) periodical edited by David Lester Richardson in the 1827-29 period, and he is supposed to have encouraged her to publish collections on her own account. David Richardson was an East India Company officer, on furlough to the UK during the LWR period.

In 1828 she published a first collection, Poems, by private subscription running to 1,700 copies. and more blandly in The Athenaeum as a work of 'chasteness ... of thought and language, pleasing and appropriate similes, natural metaphors and very gentle pathos ... [with] a vein of melancholy running through the whole.' Poems was reprinted in 1828 and a third edition published in 1829;

Richardson next published Poems: Second Series in 1834. The New Monthly Magazine received the second series with high praise: 'full of poetic gems' each without exception showing 'evidence of an elegant and highly cultivated mind'. A third set of poems, Grandmamma's Sampler; with some other Rhymes for Children was published in 1836.

Summary of works Adonia (1801) Volume I Volume II Volume III Volume IV Poems (1828) Poems: Second Series (1834) Grandmamma's Sampler; with some other Rhymes for Children (1836)