Boston's Catherine Crowley (1856-1920), Writer of Popular Children's Books and Historical Romance Novels
Mary Catherine Crowley was part of a generation of post-Famine Boston Irish and Irish-American women who rose to prominence in the late 19th and early 20th century. She and numerous other young women writers were encouraged and first published in The Boston Pilot under editors John Boyle O’Reilly and Katharine Conway . Born in Boston on November 28, 1856, her father’s family were prominent in the Catholic history of Boston; her grandfather, Daniel Crowley, was one of the early Catholic settlers in East Boston, and her father defended the local Catholic Church against an attack by a Know Nothing mob in 1854. On her mother’s side, she was part of the famous Cameron family of Scotland, wrote James B. Cullen in The Story of the Irish in Boston . She attended the Notre Dame Academy, Roxbury and then the Academy of the Sacred Heart in Manhattanville. Early in her career, she used a pen name, Janet Grant, when submitting writing to The Boston Globe. Crowle...