Author: Hood, Catharine
Biography:
HOOD, Catharine (fl 1801)
Catharine Hood took the somewhat unusual step of putting her name, without further details, on the title-page of her only known publication. She must have been well to do; the work was handsomely printed “for the author” (not by subscription), and amounts to over 100 pages. She appears to have been an educated woman of leisure. The contents are ambitious, comprising a long blank-verse anti-Jacobin poem against populist demagogues and violent reform; fourteen “odes,” most of them short; and miscellaneous poems, among them two of Hood’s own translations from French. The most interesting feature of the collection is that six of the odes and a few minor poems were contributed by “a Friend” who translates from Greek and employs Latin epigraphs—almost certainly a man. It was advertised in a London paper. The reviews were brief and dismissive. The Poetical Register noted the “simplicity of style” of the volume and said it would do no harm; the Monthly Review commented harshly on the title poem but allowed that the minor pieces were better. Neither internal evidence nor the reviews provide clues to the personal identity or residence of the author, and there are too many Catharine or Catherine Hoods to choose from in the public records. [Morning Chronicle 1 May 1801; Poetical Register [1802], 439; Monthly Review [1802], 328)