rs. Catherine Crowe, whose maiden name was Stevens, was born at Borough Green, in Kent, about 1800, and died in 1876. She married Colonel Crowe in 1822, and took up her residence with him in Edinburgh. Her books were written chiefly between the years 1838 and 1859, and she is best known by her novel, "Susan Hopley," and her collection of ghost stories, "The Night Side of Nature." She was a woman of considerable ability, which appears, however, to have run into rather obscure and sombre channels, such as showed a somewhat morbid bent of mind, with a tendency towards depression, which culminated at last in a short but violent attack of insanity. But love of the unseen and supernatural does not seem to have blunted her keenness of observation in ordinary life, for her novels, the scenes of which are laid chiefly among homely and domestic surroundings, display alike soundness of judgment and considerable dramatic power. As a writer, indeed, Mrs. Crowe was extremely versatile; she wrote plays, children's stories, short historical tales, romantic novels, as well as the ghost stories with which her name seems chiefly to be associated in the minds of this generation. It is evident too, that she believed herself—rightly or wrongly—to be possessed of great philosophical discrimination; but it must be acknowledged that her philosophical and metaphysical studies often led her into curious byways of speculation, into which the reader does not willingly wander.
It is worth noting that Mrs. Crowe's ideas respecting the status and education of women were, for the days in which she lived, exceedingly "advanced." In "Lilly Dawson," for instance, a story published in 1847, she makes an elaborate protest against the kind of education which women were then receiving. "It is true," she says, "that there is little real culture amongst men; there are few strong minds and fewer honest ones, but they have still more advantages. If their education has been bad, it has at least been a trifle better than ours. Six hours a day at Latin and Greek are better than six hours a day at worsted work and embroidery; and time is better spent in acquiring a smattering of mathematics than in strumming Hook's lessons on a bad pianoforte."
Her views of women in general are well expressed in the following words from the same work of fiction. "If, as we believe, under no system of training, the intellect of woman would be found as strong as that of a man, she is compensated by her intuitions being stronger. If her reason be less majestic, her insight is clearer; where man reasons she sees. Nature, in short, gave her all that was needful to enable her to play a noble part in the world's history, if man would but let her play it out, and not treat her like a full-grown baby, to be flattered and spoilt on the one hand, and coerced and restricted on the other, vibrating between royal rule and slavish serfdom." Surely we hear the voice of Nora Helmer herself, the very quintessence of Ibsenism! It must have required considerable courage to write in this way in the year 1847, and Mrs. Crowe should certainly be numbered among the lovers of educational reform. In many ways she seems to have been a woman of strong individuality and decided opinions.
Her first work was a drama, "Aristodemus," published anonymously in 1838; it showed considerable ability and was well regarded by the critics. She then wrote a novel, "Men and Women, or Manorial Rights," in 1839; and in 1841 published her most successful work of fiction: "Susan Hopley, or the Adventures of a Maid-servant." This story was more generally popular than any other from her pen, but it is to be doubted whether it possesses more literary ability or points of greater interest than the rest.
Mrs. Crowe then embarked upon a translation of "The Seeress of Provorst," by Justinus Kerner, a book of revelations concerning the inner life of man; and in 1848 she published a book called "The Night Side of Nature," a collection of supernatural tales gathered from many sources, probably the best storehouse of ghost stories in the English language. Its interest is a little marred by the credulity of the author. She seems never to disbelieve any ghost story of any kind that comes in her way. From the humble apologies, however, with which she opens her dissertation on the subject, it is easy to see how great a change has passed over people's minds in the course of the last fifty years, with respect to the supernatural. If Mrs. Crowe had lived in these days, she would have found herself in intimate relations with the Society for Psychical Research, and would have had no reason to excuse herself for the choice of her subject.She divides her book into sections, which treat of dreams (where we get Sir Noel Paton's account of his mother's curious vision); warnings; double-dreaming and trance, with the stories of Colonel Townshend's voluntary trance and the well-known legend of Lord Balcarres and the ghost of Claverhouse; doppel-gängers and apparitions (including the stories of Lady Beresford's branded wrist and Lord Lyttleton's warning); and other chapters descriptive of haunted houses, with details concerning clairvoyance and the use of the crystal. It is interesting to find among these the original account of "Pearlin Jean," of which Miss Sarah Tytler has made such excellent use in one of her recent books. An account of the phenomena of stigmata and the case of Catherine Emmerich, are also described in detail. Lovers of the supernatural will find much to gratify their taste in a perusal of "The Night Side of Nature."
Mrs. Crowe did not exhaust the subject in this volume, for she issued a book on ghosts and family legends, a volume for Christmas, in the year 1859; a work full of the kind of stories which became so popular in the now almost obsolete Christmas Annual of succeeding years. It is also curious to note, that in 1848, Mrs. Crowe produced a work of an entirely different nature, namely, an excellent story for children, entitled "Pippie's Warning, or Mind Your Temper"—another instance of her versatility of mind.
"The Adventures of a Beauty" and "Light and Darkness" appeared in 1852. The latter is a collection of short tales from different sources, partly historical and partly imaginative, and certainly more in accordance with the taste of modern days than her elaborate domestic stories. Mrs. Crowe's taste for the horrible is distinctly perceptible in this collection. There is an account of the celebrated poisoners, Frau Gottfried, Madame Ursinus, and Margaret Zwanziger, whose crimes were so numerous that they themselves forgot the number of their victims; and of Mr. Tinius, who went about making morning calls and murdering the persons whom he honoured with a visit. The histories of Lesurques, the hero of the "Lyons Mail," and of Madame Louise, Princess of France, who became a nun, are well narrated; but nearly all the stories are concerned with horrors such as suggest the productions of Mr. Wilkie Collins. "The Priest of St. Quentin" and "The Lycanthropist" are two of the most powerful.
Her next novel, a more purely domestic one, was "Linny Lockwood," issued in 1854. A sentence from the preface to this book anticipates—rather early, as we may think—the approaching death of the three-volume novel: "Messrs. Routledge and Co. have been for some time soliciting me to write them an original novel for their cheap series; and being convinced that the period for publishing at £1 11s. 6d., books of a kind that people generally read but once, is gone by, I have resolved to make the experiment."