Excuse my dust: Catherine Sinclair
The Victorian J.K. Rowling?
'The main objection against it is that those who commence the reading of it forget to eat and sleep till it is finished.'
(Advertisement for Beatrice)
‘[Aunt] Catherine boldly struck out into the realms of fiction, and conveyed a moral — always a moral — so subtly, beneath vivid descriptions of fashionable life and pages of racy dialogue, that they had a real and far-reaching success. … poor, plain, pockmarked Catherine.’
(Lucy Walford, Recollections of a Scottish Novelist, 1910)
Who was she?
Born in Charlotte Square in 1800, daughter of Sir John Sinclair, eminent agriculturist and statistician, Sinclair was one of thirteen children – a large family which provided inspiration for her fiction. She never married, but served as secretary to her father until his death in 1835 and then lived with her sister (in George Street, of course). It is said that Sir John was a domestic tyrant whose insistence that his daughters be inoculated against smallpox left her scarred and therefore unmarriageable. She wrote books for children, for girls of the age between the schoolroom and marriage, and for adults.
Sinclair’s best-known book is the children’s book Holiday House (1839) which began as stories told to her nieces and nephews. Required childhood reading for the next hundred years, it is notable in the history of children’s literature for beginning the great swing away from the idea that children’s fiction should be morally improving to the idea that it should reflect children as they really are.