Cirrus@Austlit

Epigraph: The past! The dark, unfathom'd retrospect! The teeming gulf! The sleepers and the shadows! Walt Whitman

Introduction: The Catherine who gives this play its title was an actual historical figure about whom very little is known. She was born, probably in 1769, on the Fitzwilliam estates in Staffordshire where she grew up and was given the kind of education which would fit her to become a lady's maid, was convicted at the Staffordshire Assizes of petty theft and sentenced to seven years' transportation to the new colony at Botany Bay....Mary Lord. (pp.1-2).