Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Caroline Norton
-
Standard Name: Norton, Caroline
Birth Name: Caroline Elizabeth Sarah Sheridan
Pseudonym: A Young Lady of Distinction, aged eleven years
Married Name: Caroline Elizabeth Sarah Norton
Pseudonym: Pearce Stevenson, Esq.
Married Name: The Honourable Mrs Norton
Pseudonym: Aunt Carry
Pseudonym: Cxxxy
Pseudonym: Libertas
Publishing over forty years of the nineteenth century, professional woman of letters CN
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.
Thereafter, she taught herself, studying philosophy, Latin, German, Italian, French, political economy, and theology.
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
199
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Dorling, William. Memoirs of Dora Greenwell. James Clarke.
73
She was very well read and took a particular interest in the writings of Caroline Norton
, Felicia Hemans
Anthologization
Dora Greenwell
DG
also contributed during this decade, in collaboration with Jean Ingelow
, Caroline Norton
, and several other women, to Home Thoughts and Home Scenes, In Original Poems, published in 1865, a book of poetry for children.
Friends, Associates
Charlotte Guest
CG
's friends included Benjamin Disraeli
(with whom she shared poetical enthusiasms before her first marriage), and her cousin Henry Layard
, who became famous as an archaeologist (the discoverer of ancient Nineveh) and who...
Friends, Associates
Matilda Charlotte Houstoun
In her youth MCH
's family associated with various prominent figures. Living close to John Wilson Croker
, she became acquainted with many literary people, including Theodore Hook
and the family of Caroline Norton
...
Dedications
Matilda Charlotte Houstoun
She dedicated it to Caroline Norton
's brother, who shared the name of his grandfather Richard Brinsley Sheridan
, and to the memory of Houstoun's own brother, John Heneage Jesse
.
Houstoun, Matilda Charlotte. A Woman’s Memories of World-Known Men. F. V. White.
Houstoun, Matilda Charlotte. A Woman’s Memories of World-Known Men. F. V. White.
I: prelims; II: prelims
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Catherine Hume
The starting-point for the poem is the tradition (subtly questioned) of Sappho's suicide as an abandoned woman; this fact links the text to other responses to the topic by other women poets including Felicia Hemans
Textual Production
Jean Ingelow
JI
, along with Dora Greenwell
, Caroline Norton
, and others, published Home Thoughts and Home Scenes, a collection of poetry depicting scenes of childhood and domestic life.
Ingelow, Jean et al. Home Thoughts and Home Scenes. Routledge, Warne and Routledge.
prelims
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Lucille Iremonger
Her opening chapter addresses her own experience, with heartfelt reminiscence about the impact of political campaigning on married life. She sets out to combat the view of the candidate's (later the member's) wife either as...
Mary Russell Mitford
was another who knew FK
well even apart from their connection through the theatre.
Mitford, Mary Russell. The Life of Mary Russell Mitford: Told by Herself in Letters To Her Friends. Editor L’Estrange, Alfred Guy Kingham, Harper and Brothers.
2: 119-20
Other friends from this period or soon afterwards included the future poet and novelist Caroline Norton
Friends, Associates
L. E. L.
By the time LEL began living alone, she was well-known in literary circles. She became a good friend of Emma Roberts
and Rosina Bulwer-Lytton
around this time, and gradually became a recognized London public figure...
Friends, Associates
Eliza Lynn Linton
Eliza Lynn met a number of women authors who were once applauded but later complacently forgotten . . . . as literary fossils.
Linton, Eliza Lynn, and Beatrice Harraden. My Literary Life. Hodder and Stoughton.
85
She contended that Women who wrote were then few and far...
Textual Features
Eliza Lynn Linton
The protagonist, Phoebe, is only sixteen when she marries the twenty-year-old student Sherrard Barrington, who then goes abroad to earn money for their support, leaving her to live with her mother and their daughter. Phoebe...
Intertextuality and Influence
Maria Theresa Longworth
She was not the only one to find inspiration for writing in her court experience. In addition to widespread newspaper coverage and several reports of the trials themselves, other creative responses continued to appear. J. R. O'Flanagan
