Catherine Ray

Catherine Ray (b. circa 1830) was a traveller, writer, teacher, social and political reformer, and the earliest English translator of Ibsen.

Life Catherine Ray was born and raised in Suffolk. Her father died when she was three, and she was repeatedly ill in childhood. Following the death of her mother, whom Catherine nursed in her final illness, she began a twenty five year period of frequent travel, visiting Scandinavia, Russia, continental Europe and Australia. Although Ray herself asserted that it had '"received very favourable press notices", Writing in The Academy, William Wallace acknowledged: "Altogether 'The Exiles of the Zillerthal', unambitious as it is, and suggestive, as regards its author, of literary power in reserve, may, without exaggeration, be described as a model story of its class."

Works "Catalan Bay: A Story of Gibraltar", The Monthly Packet, 1872 Henrik Ibsen, The Emperor and the Galilean, trans. Catherine Ray. London: Samuel Tinsley, 1876. A Farm on the Fjord: A Tale of Life in Norway. London and Edinburgh, 1877. "Edelraute; or Five and Twenty Years Ago at the Achen See", The Ladies' Edinburgh Magazine, vol. 3, 1877. Aground in the Shallows. 2 vols. London: Remington, 1879. A New Exodus; or, the Exiles of the Zillerthal. A story of the Protestants of the Tyrol. London: Nisbet and Co, 1887