Catherine Sinclair
Catherine Sinclair (1800-64), daughter of Sir John Sinclair, began her literary career writing books for children, the most popular of which was Holiday House (1839). Her best-known works for adults included Modern Accomplishments (1836), Modern Society (1837) and Modern Flirtations (1841), a series of novels examining the education and socialization of young women. Whether writing for children or adults, Sinclair represented her fiction as a source of moral improvement. But, as Timothy Baker has observed, her novels became increasingly baroque, with complicated plots, Gothic tropes, and anti-Catholic sentiment replacing the moral discourse of her earlier efforts. Sinclair was involved in a variety of charitable endeavors in her native Edinburgh, including the establishment of cooking depots for working men and the institution of drinking fountains around the city.
Bibliography
Timothy Baker, “Catherine Sinclair, Domestic Community, and the Catholic Imagination,” Studies in the Novel 45.2 (2013), pp. 143-60.
A. Robin Hoffman, “Holiday House, Childhood, and the End(s) of Time,” Children’s Literature 41 (2013), pp. 115-39.