Mrs. A. T. Thomson

Mrs. A. T. Thomson (1797–1862), born Katherine Byerley, was an English historical writer and novelist. The daughter of a Staffordshire partner of Josiah Wedgwood, she married the physician Anthony Todd Thomson in 1820 and began writing to help support a large family. Memoirs of the Court of Henry the Eighth (1826) was followed by lives of Sir Walter Raleigh and of Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, by Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 in three volumes (1845–46), and by novels of English history and society. With her son John Cockburn Thomson she wrote, as Grace and Philip Wharton, The Queens of Society and The Wits and Beaux of Society.