Catherine Gasquoine Hartley

C. Gasquoine Hartley or Catherine Gasquoine Hartley or Mrs Walter Gallican (1866/7–1928) was a writer and art historian with a particular expertise on Spanish art. Latterly she wrote about polygamy, motherhood and sex education.

Life Hartley was born in 1866 or 1867 in Antananarivo in the Merina Kingdom of Madagascar to Reverend Richard Griffiths Hartley and his wife Catherine (née Gasquoine), both from Manchester. Her parents had served as missionaries in Mauritius before they went to Madagascar. Her father left them with a poor financial position when he died in 1870 after the family had returned to Hampshire. Hartley inherited her father's passion for teaching, and she first worked as a teacher in Southport, where she was brought up. She rose to be the headteacher at Babington House, Eltham, Kent in 1894. She left this post to write sometime around 1903. In 1913, she published her final book on Spain, The Cathedrals of Southern Spain.

Hartley's husband had published Modern Woman and How to Manage Her in 1909 and he continued to publish controversial titles about women, polygamy and sex education. Before they divorced in 1915, Hartley adopted a son, Leslie, who had been born in 1904. Single again, she investigated new areas in her writing where she investigated social issues including motherhood and sex. In 1916 she wrote Children of the Empire with her new husband, the Zionist journalist Arthur Daniel Lewis. Her latter works were The Position of Women in primitive society, Motherhood and the Relationships of the Sexes, Woman's Wild Oats: Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards, Divorce (Today and Tomorrow), Mind of the Naughty Child and latterly Women, Children, Love and Marriage in 1924.

She was hit by a van on 7 June 1928 and died two days later. Hartley was buried in the Willesden Jewish Cemetery next to her second husband.

Selected works Pictures in the Tate Gallery, 1904 The Story of Seville (with Gallichan) A Record of Spanish Painting, 1904 The Weaver's Shuttle, 1905 Spain Revisited: a Summer Holiday in Galicia, 1911 The Story of Santiago de Compostela, 1912 (plagiarist) The Cathedrals of Southern Spain, 1913 Children of the Empire (with Lewis) The Position of Women in Primitive Society, 1914 Motherhood and the Relationships of the Sexes, 1917 Woman's Wild Oats: Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards, 1919 Things seen in Spain, 1921 Divorce (Today and Tomorrow), 1921 Mind of the Naughty Child, 1923 Women, Children, Love and Marriage, 1924