Caroline Norton

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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.
Photograph of a painting of Caroline Norton by Sir George Hayter, 1832. She is seated at a desk with her chin resting pensively on her left hand while she pauses in writing with a quill pen in a large open book. Behind her is red drapery, a large column, and a nighttime scene. Her bare shoulders emerge from a white gauzy bodice with puffed, bound sleeves, gold trim at the neckline, and a gold mantle over it. She has gold bracelets on both her wrists; her black hair, parted in the middle, is coiled over her

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Literary responses Christina Rossetti
The London Review was very positive, considering the writing the genuine utterance of a richly imaginative mind and of a very high order.
Marsh, Jan. Christina Rossetti: A Writer’s Life. Viking.
28
The Spectator talked about CR 's genius and artistic discrimination. Other...
Textual Features Rosina Bulwer Lytton, Baroness Lytton
The book's satire on parliament for its treatment of women was highly topical at a date two years after the new Divorce Act, three years after the Married Women's Property Committee was formed, and during...
Intertextuality and Influence Rosina Bulwer Lytton, Baroness Lytton
It had been written in 1866 but was not published for almost fifteen years (perhaps for fear of being sued for libel). One of her other life-writing texts was called Nemesis. She claimed that...
Friends, Associates Elizabeth Rigby
In 1854 she met Charles Kingsley at a dinner given by Richard Monckton Milnes . Henry Layard, the traveller and archaeologist, also became a friend. Harriet Grote was another new and close friend, and...
Family and Intimate relationships Maria Riddell
Her daughter, Anna Maria , married a naval officer, Charles Montagu Walker , and had eight children. Most of her inheritance vanished in mortgages and contested ownership. One of MR 's grandsons took an interest...
Intertextuality and Influence Julia O'Faolain
The topics covered in richly informative detail, far too many to enumerate, include a father's life-or-death rights over his offspring in ancient Greece, while such topics as buying and selling sex, or the relation...
politics Harriett Mozley
HM was one of those for whom religion and politics were hardly distinguishable. In 1832, during the time leading up to the Reform Bill, she sounds like a Tory in politics as she observes with...
Friends, Associates Thomas Moore
His social circle included prominent literary women: Mary Tighe , sisters Lady Morgan (Sydney Owenson) and Olivia Clarke , Mary Shelley , Marguerite Blessington , Louisa Stuart Costello , and Caroline Norton . He knew...
Publishing Mary Russell Mitford
Caroline Norton 's Court Magazine printed a story by MRM .
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: 144
Occupation George Meredith
GM 's prolific career as a poet and novelist spanned four decades and established him as a important British literary figure. He published his first collection of poetry, Poems (1851), at his own expense. It...
Textual Production Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington
Marguerite Blessington edited the annual The Keepsake, in succession to F. M. Reynolds , Caroline Norton , and Lady Emmeline Stuart Wortley .
Library catalogues all have the period of her editorship as 1841-1850.
Solo: Search Oxford University Libraries Online. http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=OXVU1&fromLogin=true&reset_config=true.
Feldman, Paula R., editor. British Women Poets of the Romantic Era. John Hopkins University Press.
150
Family and Intimate relationships Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington
Respectable women had always shunned Blessington on account of her past; now her present too was publicly unacceptable. Her sister Ellen, now well married, dropped her.
Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington,. “Introduction”. Conversations of Lord Byron, edited by Ernest J. Lovell, Princeton University Press, pp. 3-114.
80
Camilla Crosland later recalled how as an unmarried...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington
In the plot, Jim is suspected in the murder of a policeman, but later becomes sensibly disillusioned with repeal. Grace improves her natural goodness by reading the Bible in an almost Protestant manner. She ministers...
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
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...

Timeline

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Texts

Norton, Caroline. Stuart of Dunleath. H. Colburn, 1851.
Norton, Caroline. The Child of the Islands. Chapman and Hall, 1845.
Norton, Caroline, and Robert Cruikshank. The Dandies’ Rout. J. Marshall, 1820.
Norton, Caroline. The Dream. H. Colburn, 1840.
Norton, Caroline, editor. The English Annual. E. Churton, 1834.
Reynolds, Frederic Mansel et al., editors. The Keepsake. Hurst, Chance; R. Jennings.
Norton, Caroline. The Lady of La Garaye. Macmillan, 1862.
Norton, Caroline. The Letters of Caroline Norton to Lord Melbourne. Editors Hoge, James O. and Clarke Olney, Ohio State University Press, 1974.
Norton, Caroline. The Separation of Mother and Child. Roake and Varty, 1838.
Norton, Caroline. “The Separation of Mother and Child by the Law of ’Custody of Infants’ Considered”. The Mothers: Controversies of Motherhood, edited by Marie Mulvey Roberts and Tamae Mizuta, Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1994, pp. 1-58.
Norton, Caroline. The Sorrows of Rosalie. J. Ebers, 1829.
Norton, Caroline. The Undying One. H. Colburn and R. Bentley, 1830.
Norton, Caroline. The Wife; and, Woman’s Reward. Saunders and Otley, 1835.