Catherine is the protagonist and, through her journal entries, the first-person narrator of A Gathering of Days. Since the novel is a bildungsroman, tracing her passage from childhood to maturity, she is not the same person at the beginning and the ending of the story.

As the story begins, when Catherine is 13, she expresses her devotion to the small circle of her family and friends: her father, sister, and uncle; her best friend, Cassie Shipman; and Cassie’s family. She wishes that she can stay in her house, secure in the love of these people, forever. When she thinks of her friend Sophy going to Lowell to work in the mills, she says that she would be terrified to be torn from “all that [she] love[s]—people, place, and ways” (12).

She is artistic, often sketching in her lesson book when she should be practicing her handwriting; pious, reflecting on the sermons she hears as she attends two church services every Sunday; a good student who shows respect for her teacher; and a hard worker. She has taken her mother’s place in the home for the past four years, doing the cooking and mending and watching over her seven-year-old sister, Matty.