Catharine Trotter

Catharine Trotter (London, 1679 by most accounts, though some give 1674; London, 1749) was an English novelist, playwright and philosopher. She lived through the late Restoration and the early Enlightenment, and her importance lies in arguing, during a lively philosophical debate, that reason can lead us to moral truths.

Born to Scottish parents, she was left in straitened circumstances after her father, a naval commander, died. She was raised a Protestant but converted to Catholicism while still very young. She published her first novel anonymously in 1693 and went on to write tragedies and comedies staged in London, among them Fatal Friendship (1698), usually considered her finest play. In 1702 she published a defence of John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, which won her the author's friendship; he sent her money and books.

Her thinking centred on moral questions. She held that moral principles are not innate but can be discovered by each person through reason, a faculty she saw as a gift from God. She returned to the Church of England in 1707, married the clergyman Patrick Cockburn the following year, and wrote little until 1726. After her death, Thomas Birch prepared the two-volume Works (1751), which remains the main source for her thought.