Catherine Trotter Cockburn

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Catharine Trotter Cockburn (16 August 1679 - 11 May 1749) was a novelist, dramatist, and philosopher. Born to Scottish parents living in London,Trotter was raised Protestant but converted to Roman Catholicism at an early age. She finally returned to the Church of England in 1707, after what she terms much "free and impartial Enquiries." After an illustrious career, her father, navy captain David Trotter, died of the plague in 1684, leaving his family in financial jeopardy. Catharine was a precocious, physically attractive, and largely self-educated young woman, who had her first novel (The Adventures of a Young Lady, later retitled Olinda's Adventures) published anonymously in 1693, when she was but 14 years old. Her first published play, Agnes de Castro (a verse dramatization of Aphra Behn's story of the same title), was staged two years later. In 1696, she was famously satirized alongside Delarivier Manley and Mary Pix in the anonymous play, The Female Wits. In it, Trotter was lampooned in the figure of "Calista, a lady who pretends to the learned languages and assumes to herself the name of critic." Her second and arguably best-liked play The Fatal Friendship was staged in 1698.