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.

Milestones

12 February 1869

Lady CL was born in Vienna, where her father was then at the British embassy.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.

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. Editor Elizabeth Edith, Countess of Balfour, Heinemann.
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. Editor Elizabeth Edith, Countess of Balfour, Heinemann.
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. Editor Elizabeth Edith, Countess of Balfour, Heinemann.
264
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.

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.
237-8

Birth