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.
  • BirthName: Constance Georgina Lytton
  • Nickname: Con
    Balfour, Elizabeth Edith, Countess of, and Constance Lytton. “Preface, Introduction”. Letters of Constance Lytton, edited by Elizabeth Edith, Countess of Balfour and Elizabeth Edith, Countess of Balfour, Heinemann, 1925, p. v, xi - xv.
    xiii

  • Pseudonym: Miss Jane Warton
  • Styled: Lady
  • Indexed: Bulwer-Lytton
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 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 Balfour, Elizabeth Edith, Countess of, 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. Editor Balfour, Elizabeth Edith, Countess of, 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. Editor Balfour, Elizabeth Edith, Countess of, Heinemann, 1925.
264
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.

Biography

Birth

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/.

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