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.
Critical or popular attention has been less forthcoming in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and there has been little revival of GF
's work, although the US firm Garland
reprinted some of her novels in...
Lady Emily Cowper had tried to influence her brother's life before: over his marriage to the novelist Lady Caroline Lamb
(who had died four years before this), and over his relationship, already begun, with another...
Friends, Associates
Lucie Duff Gordon
Living once again with her parents in London, Lucie Austin began an active social life. She was introduced to Queen Victoria
, met and became friendly with Caroline Norton
, and was introduced to...
Caroline Norton
, one of LDG
's closest friends, wrote following her death: A great reader, a great thinker, very original in her conclusions, very eager in impressing her opinions, her mind was not like...
Fictionalization
Lucie Duff Gordon
LDG
was an inspiration to several of her literary peers. George Meredith
probably had her in mind in drawing his character Lady Dunstane in Diana of the Crossways. (His Lady Dunstane is a close...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Charles Dickens
The first issues contained loosely linked, picaresque, and quite satirical episodes resulting from the travels of Mr Pickwick and members of his eponymous club. As The Pickwick Papers progressed, the linearity of the plot strengthened...
Reception
Isa Craig
IC
's poem was chosen from among six hundred entries; other contestants included the working-class poet Gerald Massey
and diarist Arthur Munby
. Caroline Norton
, visiting Edinburgh that year, had also written a poetic...
Literary responses
Eliza Cook
An 1848 preface to a US edition of her poems ranked EC
's popularity almost as high as that of Felicia Hemans
or Caroline Norton
. It characterises her work in terms of emotion and...
Reception
Eliza Cook
Reynolds's Miscellany printed an illustration of Lady Blessington
, Eliza Cook
, and Caroline Norton
. Cook, in an open shirt and dark jacket, wears plainer and less feminine dress than the other two, whose...
Friends, Associates
Eliza Cook
Her literary friends included Alfred Henry Forrester
(Alfred Crowquill), for whose album she wrote a poem, and William Jerdan
, who gave her valuable advice about her work. She visited with American poet...
Friends, Associates
Caroline Clive
CC
remained a close friend of her early passion Catherine Gore
.
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.
She was also acquainted with Mary Russell Mitford
, whom she described as priggy,
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.