Catherine Maria Fanshawe (1765–1834) was an English poet whose work was praised by Walter Scott. She and her sisters were also artists.
Biography
Catherine Maria Fanshawe was born at Shabden in Chipstead, Surrey, 1765. She was the daughter of John Fanshawe (1738–1816), a Surrey squire, and his wife Penelope (née Dredge). Fanshawe's father held a post in the household of King George III.
After the father's death in 1816, Fanshawe and her two sisters were co-heirs. They lived at 15 Berkeley Square, London, and at Midhurst House, Richmond, Surrey, but also visited Italy due to their poor health.
Fanshawe died after a long illness at Putney Heath, then in Surrey, on 17 April 1834. Some of her poems were printed in publications by Joanna Baillie and Mary Russell Mitford in 1823 and 1859, then together in 1865 and 1876. Mitford described her as "admirable as a letter-writer, as a reader of Shakespeare, and as a designer in almost every style." Her "Fragment in Imitation of Wordsworth" appears in the Oxford Book of Parodies (edited by John Gross).
Walter Scott admired her poetry as "quite beautiful".