Catherine CroweCatherine Ann Crowe was born Catherine Ann Stevens on 20 September 1790 in Borough Green, Kent, England, to unknown parents. She was educated at home and spent her early years in Kent before marrying Major John Crowe, with whom she had a son, John Wiliam Crowe. The marriage proved unhappy, and by the late 1830s she had separated from her husband and moved to Edinburgh. There, she became acquainted with notable literary figures such as Thomas de Quincey, Harriet Martineau, and William Makepeace Thackeray. Encouraged in her literary pursuits by Sydney Smith and others, Crowe established herself as a novelist and playwright. Her fiction often addressed the struggles of women in restrictive social circumstances, and she gained popularity with works like The Adventures of Susan Hopley and The Story of Lily Dawson. She later shifted her focus to supernatural phenomena, producing her most renowned work, The Night-side of Nature, in 1848. Despite periods of mental illness and a decline in popularity in later years, she continued to write, including children s books and adaptations. Crowe spent her final years in Folkestone, where she died on 14 June 1872. Her father s and mother s names remain unrecorded. Read More Read Less