Thurston, Katherine (1875–1911)

Anglo-Irish novelist. Born Katherine Cecil Madden on April 18, 1875, in County Cork, Ireland; died of asphyxia on September 5, 1911, in County Cork, Ireland; daughter of Paul Madden (a banker and mayor) and Catherine (Barry) Madden; married Ernest Charles Temple Thurston (a novelist), in 1901 (divorced 1910).

Selected works:

The Circle (1903); The Masquerader (published in England as John Chilcote, M.P., 1904); Mystics (1907); The Fly on the Wheel (1908); The Gambler (1906); Max (1908).

Novelist Katherine Thurston was born in 1875 in Wood's Gift, Cork, Ireland, the only child of Catherine Madden and Paul Madden, a prosperous Anglo-Irish banker and former mayor of Cork. She was well educated privately at their Cork County home, but did not show an inclination for writing until after her marriage at age 26 to an English novelist, Ernest Charles Temple Thurston. Two years later, she published her first novel, The Circle (1903), with little success. However, her popularity was assured with the serial publication in the American magazine Harper's Bazaar of her second work, The Masquerader. A tale of mistaken identity, The Masquerader (titled John Chilcote, M.P. in England) became a bestseller when it was published in the U.S. in book form in 1904. The novel was also turned into a popular play and was twice made into a film. Her third novel, The Gambler, appeared in Harper's Bazaar in serial form and was published as a book in 1906. Three more novels appeared to less acclaim between 1907 and 1910, but her previous successes made Thurston a popular literary figure in England and Ireland. She and her husband, who had no children, were divorced in 1910. Always in poor health, Katherine Thurston died at age 36 of asphyxia from a fainting fit at Moore's Hotel, Cork, in September 1911.

sources:

Concise Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Kunitz, Stanley J., and Howard Haycraft, eds. Twentieth Century Authors. NY: H.W. Wilson, 1942.

Laura York , M.A. in History, University of California, Riverside, California