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
Textual Production Caroline Clive
The Morlas begins with a note in which the author states that this poem has lain by me all the best years of my life. She had, she says, revised it on the specific advice...
Friends, Associates Georgiana Chatterton
In Italy GC met one of her closest friends, Helen Selina Blackwood , Caroline Norton 's elder sister.
Dering, Edward Heneage, and Georgiana Chatterton. Memoirs of Georgiana, Lady Chatterton. Hurst and Blackett.
26
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
Back in England, she met and liked Walter Savage Landor .
Dering, Edward Heneage, and Georgiana Chatterton. Memoirs of Georgiana, Lady Chatterton. Hurst and Blackett.
37
She moved and entertained...
Friends, Associates Jane Welsh Carlyle
JWC criticized the party, which was also attended by Elizabeth Gaskell , William Thackeray , and Tom Taylor .
Surtees, Virginia. Jane Welsh Carlyle. Michael Russell.
204
Around this time JWC also met Frédéric François Chopin , who played her piano, and Caroline Norton .
Surtees, Virginia. Jane Welsh Carlyle. Michael Russell.
205
Literary responses Elizabeth Barrett Browning
H. N. Coleridge in his survey of Modern English Poetesses in the Quarterly Review in 1840 ranked EBB second of nine (after Caroline Norton ) and offered some sharp criticism as well as admiration. This...
Intertextuality and Influence Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Byron and Wordsworth were important poetic influences. Books that Elizabeth Barrett owned and kept until her death included Philip James Bailey 's Festus, A Poem, a major text of the spasmodic school, L. E. L.
Textual Production Elizabeth Barrett Browning
There followed, also in the Athenæum, a review of Wordsworth 's poems in August 1842. As well as these, EBB provided both critical contributions on Carlyle and Tennyson , and material gleaned from her...
Literary responses Charlotte Brontë
Harriet Martineau , finding the work attributed to herself even by members of her own family, felt that the unknown author must know not only my books but myself very well. . . . With...
Family and Intimate relationships Mary Ann Cavendish Bradshaw
According to her first daughter-in-law writing years later, MACB suggested, while she and the young people were in Paris, that Emily ought to advance her husband's career by either sleeping with or at least...
Textual Production Caroline Bowles
The book preceded Caroline Norton 's A Voice from the Factories by three years. It includes a dedication to economist and social reformer Michael Thomas Sadler , who fought to improve child labour conditions. Bowles...
politics Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon
In her diary, Smith wrote that she hoped that Mill would take up the cause of women's rights.
Herstein, Sheila R. A Mid-Victorian Feminist: Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon. Yale University Press.
18
She was also said to have been pointed in the direction of women's causes by the...
Family and Intimate relationships Caroline Blackwood
Through her father, CB was descended from the writer Frances Sheridan , though the Sheridan blood was thought of in the family as bad blood, and CB 's biographer seems to associate it solely...
Intertextuality and Influence Ruby M. Ayres
Dark Gentleman carries an unascribed epigraph from Caroline Norton : Until I truly loved—I was alone.
Ayres, Ruby M. Dark Gentleman. Hodder and Stoughton.
title-page
Its title is the name given by Judith Anson to Simon Trenchard, with whom at last she achieves...
Intertextuality and Influence Anna Atkins
Though AA 's preface concedes the the talent, the ingenuity, the very clever writing of sensation-authors,
Atkins, Anna. A Page from the Peerage. T. Cautley Newby.
i
it also hints that they are in it for the money, and expresses outrage at what it sees...

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