Constance Lytton

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Apart from her warm and witty private correspondence, CL is remembered as a writer solely in connection with her early-twentieth-century suffrage involvement, particularly her one-woman campaign to prove that the British government was treating political prisoners unequally according to their social rank or class status. She was a highly effective public speaker and a tireless writer of letters to the Times; she also published a pamphlet and a book about the same issues.
Black-and-white photo of Constance Lytton. She is sitting on a chair and resting her arms on the side of it. She wears a long dark dress which contrasts with the light background.
Black and white photograph of Constance Lytton, shown from the shoulders up. She is wearing a white dress and a beaded necklace, and her dark hair is pulled into a dark bun on the top of her head.

Milestones

12 February 1869
Lady CL was born in Vienna, where her father was then at the British embassy.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
August 1888
CL , still in her teens, wrote to her aunt Theresa Earle a remarkable letter of self-analysis and self-explanation which Earle printed, anonymously, in her Memoirs and Memories, 1911.
Lytton, Constance. Letters of Constance Lytton. Elizabeth Edith, Countess of Balfour,Editor , Heinemann, 1925.
9
Early March 1914
In Prison and Prisoners: Some Personal ExperiencesCL related her own years as a suffragist, and especially her imprisonment and her personal discovery of the different treatment allotted to prisoners according to their social class.
Lytton, Constance. Letters of Constance Lytton. Elizabeth Edith, Countess of Balfour,Editor , Heinemann, 1925.
240, 243
22 May 1923
CL died at the bed-sittingroom she had just moved into in London (once the lodging of Olive Schreiner ) at the early age of fifty-three.
Lytton, Constance. Letters of Constance Lytton. Elizabeth Edith, Countess of Balfour,Editor , Heinemann, 1925.
264
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

Biography

Her notorious nom de guerre was chosen with no thought of Jane Warton the eighteenth-century writer, but from a sympathetic relative named Warburton (which she altered because of distinguished bearers of that name) and from Joan of Arc (Jeanne d'Arc) .
Lytton, Constance. Prisons and Prisoners. Heinemann, 1914.
237-8

Birth

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