Catharine DeFrance Carver was born on 17th September 1921 in Cambridge, Ohio, USA. After studying at Muskingum College, Ohio, and the University of Chicago, she became an editor at the publishing firm of Reynal and Hitchcock in New York in 1945. In 1950, she was employed by Robert Giroux at Harcourt Brace, and later worked for other American publishers such as Viking and J.B. Lippincott, editing the writings of authors such as Saul Bellow, Elizabeth Bishop, Ralph Manheim and John Berryman.

In the mid 1960s, an emotional upset seems to have encouraged Catharine Carver to dispose of her possessions, burn her correspondence and leave the USA for London, where she became an editor first at Chatto and Windus and later at Oxford University Press. In 1976, she moved to Victor Gollancz, and then became freelance, working with authors such as Richard Hoggart, Richard Holmes and Jon Stallworthy.

In 1983, Catharine Carver gave up her flat in London and many of her possessions and destroyed more of her letters. She then travelled to various European countries, notably Italy and France, where she continued to work with many of her former authors. Her health deteriorated, and in 1991 while in Paris she suffered a serious stroke which severely limited her ability to read and write. She returned to London, where she lived until a final massive stroke in September 1997 put her in hospital, where she died on 11th November 1997.

Catharine Carver brought the discipline of scholarship to her editing work, immersing herself in the subject of each manuscript and checking references and quotations as assiduously as punctuation and grammar. To her authors she was demanding, sympathetic and inspiring, and was considered by many to be the finest editor of her time.

[Notes based on the Catharine Carver entry by Michael Millgate in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004)]

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