Born: 18 April 1875, Ireland
Died: 5 September 1911
Country most active: Ireland, United Kingdom
Also known as: Katherine Cecil Madden
This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Nicholas Allen. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Thurston, Katherine Cecil (1875–1911), novelist, was born 18 April 1875 in Wood’s Gift, Co. Cork, daughter of Paul Madden , chairman of the Munster and Leinster Bank and twice nationalist lord mayor of Cork, and Catherine Madden (née Barry). Educated privately, she enjoyed horse-riding and swimming as the pursuits of a carefree childhood. Nothing more is known of her life till she married Ernest Temple Thurston in 1901. They divided their time between 20 Victoria Road, Kensington, London, and May Croft, a cottage in Ardmore, Co. Waterford. She wrote in the seclusion of this second home and from it produced her first novel, The circle (1903). John Chilcote, MP (1904) was a great commercial success and sold over 200,000 copies, being published in America as The masquerader (1904). Scripted by her husband, it was produced by Sir George Alexander at St John’s Theatre, London, in 1905. She next published The gambler (1906), a romantic melodrama that whirls around a society of social privilege between rural Ireland, Venice, Monte Carlo, and London. The mystics (1907) coincided with the failure of her marriage, as Ernest Temple Thurston left her in December 1907 on the premise that he needed to experience society’s depths to inspire his own writing. He was also jealous of her commercial success. Katherine Thurston’s The fly on the wheel (1908) is an unusual tale of obsessive love that charts the fall of the Waterford solicitor Stephen Carey; it is perhaps the first Irish novel to feature a motor-car in a love scene. The story ends with Isabel Costello’s suicide in front of her lover Stephen and a priest. She takes toxic pills in a glass of wine, a reverse communion that is suggestive of the author’s radicalism. Max (1910) is a less successful tale of one twin impersonating another. Thurston obtained her divorce on 7 April 1910 on grounds of her husband’s adultery and desertion. An entertaining public speaker with a soft, gentle voice, she was a popular London socialite. Tall and willowy in appearance, she suffered periodically from epilepsy and fainting fits. She died of asphyxiation during one of the latter on 5 September 1911 at Moore’s Hotel, Cork. Having visited relatives in the county she was due to remarry the same month, and left the majority of her estate to her fiancé, A. T. Bulkeley Gavin.