Youngest daughter of Col. James Cochrane of Ochiltree and Culross (1690-1758) and Margaret Hawkison. Boswell's mother's cousin. Married (1759) to Nathaniel Gould. Earlier marriage (1750) to Henry Carey Hamilton (b. ca. 1708) of Holycross. One of her sisters was Mary Ann Cochrane (d. 1780) who married Dublin attorney Robert Sibthorpe.1
Mrs. Gould's father, James Cochrane, was the brother of Boswell's maternal grandmother, Euphemia Cochrane.
Boswell first went to visit the Goulds, whom he had not previously met despite the family relation between Mrs. Gould and himself, on December 2, 1762 in London. During the next months, he often dined with them and enjoyed their company. Even so, on January 6, 1763, Mrs. Gould (jokingly) blamed Boswell for not visiting them more often. Paradoxically, Lady Betty Macfarlane had, the day before, jokingly said of Boswell that "his weakness is that he would prefer Mrs. Gould's to this [the company of Macfarlane and her family]".