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.
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
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...
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...
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.
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...
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...
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...
Family and Intimate relationships
Harriette Wilson
On the journey to Newcastle HW
had begun a flirtation with the witty Tom Sheridan
(born 1775, son of the playwright, grandson of Frances Sheridan
, and father of Caroline Norton
). He and his...
Education
Dora Greenwell
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
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.
I: prelims
death
Lucie Duff Gordon
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...
death
Edmund Spenser
Spenser's early women readers who were also poets seem to have included An Collins
and Alicia D'Anvers
. Later women writers in English either found him useful for raising the status of the romance genre...
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.