Catherine Lord was born in Poona, East Indies in 1845 to British parents. After the death of her father when she was five years old, Catherine moved to England with her mother under the care of her grandfather Sir Thomas Joshua Platt (1788-1862). Catherine started writing under the pen name ‘Lucy Hardy’ in 1892 and her stories were published in Argosy, Belgravia, and The Sketch. She died within a decade of becoming a professional writer and died in 1901 of exhaustion. Her short stories were never collected in her lifetime and she vanished into obscurity until Johnny Mains discovered her work in 2017 and published her first collection of short stories, Our Lady of Hate (Noose & Gibbet, 2020