Publishing over forty years of the nineteenth century, professional woman of letters Caroline Norton produced poetry and songs, four novels, stories, and a few unsuccessful plays. She edited annuals and periodicals, where she also published work of her own, including reviews. The circumstances of her life led her also to publish on the social-reform topics of child labour, divorce law, and married women's property, in pamphlets, letters to the
Times, and well-researched monographs. Though she thought of herself as primarily a poet, her polemical writing is now her best-known, just as her contribution to reforming the laws for women in Victorian England has now overshadowed the scandal that dogged her in and beyond her lifetime.
Milestones
22 March 1808 Caroline Sheridan (later CN) was born in
London; she was the middle one of three girls in a family of seven children.
1820 Publisher
J. Marshall issued
The Dandies' Rout, a 16-page booklet by 'A Young Lady of Distinction, aged eleven years': that is, Caroline Sheridan (later CN).
May 1854 CN had her attack on
English Laws for Women in the Nineteenth Century printed for private circulation; it continued in more formal style the arguments of her letters to the
Times.
15 June 1877 CN died at
10 Upper Grosvenor Street,
London, of a sudden illness that lasted only a few days; she had re-married just three months before, and was looking forward to travelling in the near future.
