Catherine Sarah "Kate" Ferguson ( Lee; November 3, 1841 – May 30, 1928), better known by her pen name "Kate Lee Ferguson," was an American novelist, poet, and composer best known as the author of Cliquot (1889) and Little Mose (1891). Biography Catherine Sarah Lee was born on November 3, 1841, in Lexington, Kentucky, where she was educated, to William Henry and Ellen (née Ware) Lee. On August 28, 1862, she married Lieutenant-Colonel Samuel Wragg Ferguson of the 28th Mississippi Cavalry Regiment and accompanied him on his various campaigns. She shocked all of her acquaintances by appearing in 1886 in an amateur production of "Sea of Ice", a then popular drama, "assuming the part of a young Indian maid, in very inadequate clothing – her kirtie only coming down to the knees on one side, and not that far on the other, with bare arms, bare bosom, bare legs, and big bracelets round her ankles." Published in 1889, Cliquot is the story of Neil Emory, who owns an unpredictable and dangerous horse named Cliquot, whom he cannot find a rider for, as the horse has already killed several previous riders. A mysterious jockey appears who wins the owner a fortune and then turns out to be a beautiful woman named Gwendoline Gwinn, the horse’s previous owner. The story is imbued with lust in the "bodice-ripping style", where "female bosoms heave with desire and heroes express their love in ways that an earlier generation would have found much too suggestive." Selected works Novels Cliquot: A Racing Story of Ideal Beauty (1889) Little Mose (1891) Short stories A Woman's Army Experience (1898) See also List of women writers References External links Official Kate Lee Ferguson Papers at the Louisiana State University General information Kate Lee Ferguson at Mississippi Writers and Musicians 1841 births 1928 deaths 19th-century American composers 19th-century American Episcopalians 19th-century American novelists 19th-century American poets 19th-century American short story writers 19th-century American women writers 20th-century American Episcopalians 19th-century women composers American women composers American women memoirists 19th-century American memoirists American romantic fiction novelists American women novelists American women short story writers Burials in Mississippi Deaths in Mississippi Novelists from Mississippi People from Greenville, Mississippi People from Harrison County, Mississippi People from Lexington, Kentucky People of Mississippi in the American Civil War Poets from Mississippi Women romantic fiction writers Writers of American Southern literature 19th-century American women musicians 20th-century American women