Catherine Furze

Catherine Furze is an 1893 novel by Mark Rutherford, the pen name of William Hale White (1831-1913), the English novelist of provincial Dissent whose quiet, scrupulous fiction won the admiration of writers from D.H. Lawrence to André Gide. Set in an Eastern Counties market town in the 1840s, the novel follows Catherine, the ironmonger’s daughter sent to a genteel school to be raised above her station, and her unspoken, unconsummated love for the married clergyman Mr Cardew, a passion both master in renunciation. White wrote from inside the chapel-going provincial world he had left, and his analysis of class, religion, and suppressed feeling carries the authority of lived knowledge. Catherine Furze is among the finest of his six novels and a classic of Victorian provincial fiction. Free PDF download available on BDeBooks.