Catherine: A Story

By William Makepeace Thackeray

Though he originally set out to depict criminals in as harshly accurate a light as possible, without the sentimentalization that he saw and disdained in Dickens' work, Thackeray's fictionalized account of the life of Catherine Hayes, an eighteenth-century woman who was burned at the stake for the murder of her husband, depicts the titular character in a somewhat more appealing and charming manner than the author intended. A must-read for fans of rollicking picaresque tales such as Moll Flanders.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sheba Blake Publishing
• Release date: Jul 26, 2015
• ISBN: 9781329574663

William Makepeace Thackeray

William Makepeace Thackeray was a nineteenth century English novelist who was most famous for his classic novel, Vanity Fair, a satirical portrait of English society. With an early career as a satirist and parodist, Thackeray shared a fondness for roguish characters that is evident in his early works such as Vanity Fair, The Luck of Barry Lyndon, and Catherine, and was ranked second only to Charles Dickens during the height of his career. In his later work, Thackeray transitioned from the satirical tone for which he was known to a more traditional Victorian narrative, the most notable of which is The History of Henry Esmond. Thackeray died in 1863.

Reviews for Catherine

[klerulo · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

This seems to be Thackeray as moralist. The preceding decade had seen an explosion in the new genre of crime novels which he believed had glorified criminals and raised lowlifes to hero status, culminating, at least in a literary sense, with the very recently published Oliver Twist. In this, his second novel after the highly amusing Yellowplush Papers, Thackeray set out to counteract what he saw as this pernicious trend.His intention seems to have been to present banal lowlifes as exactly that. He succeeded so well that he created a very dull book about singularly unattractive and unappealing characters.

[lindawwilson · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Not a good book. Poor story, uninteresting characters, boring in all respects and the author constantly interrupts the story with silly comments of his own. Disappointing, coming from Thackeray, but I think it was his first novel.