Constance Lytton

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Standard Name: Lytton, Constance
Birth Name: Constance Georgina Lytton
Indexed Name: Constance Georgina Bulwer-Lytton
Styled: Lady Constance Georgina Lytton
Nickname: Con
Pseudonym: Miss Jane Warton
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.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Dedications Olive Schreiner
OS published Woman and Labour, a global study of women's work and the impact on women of changes in the traditional division of labour, dedicated to Lady Constance Lytton .
First, Ruth, and Ann Scott. Olive Schreiner. André Deutsch, 1980.
264-5, 268-9
Family and Intimate relationships Anna Wheeler
Lady Constance Lytton (1869 - 1923), a suffragist active in the Women's Social and Political Union , was AW 's great-grand-daughter.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/, http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Family and Intimate relationships Edward Robert Bulwer Lytton, first Earl Lytton
Edward Robert Bulwer Lytton's daughter Elizabeth Edith (later Countess of Balfour) published an account of her father's time as viceroy in India, as well as fiction. Another daughter, Lady Constance Georgiana , became a suffragist...
Friends, Associates Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence
In September 1908, EPL met Lady Constance Lytton , who later became a suffragist and joined the WSPU . She and Lytton became close friends thereafter.
Pethick-Lawrence, Emmeline. My Part in a Changing World. Hyperion, 1976.
191-3
Friends, Associates Olive Schreiner
In England she also formed close friendships and intellectual bonds with feminist and socialist intellectual Eleanor Marx , barrister and mathematics professor Karl Pearson , and socialist pioneer Edward Carpenter . Others she met in...
Health Mary Gawthorpe
In a passage on prison conditions which she did not include in her published memoir, MG recalled her distaste for prison garb, especially the nauseating undergarment . . . stained as it was in a...
Intertextuality and Influence Olive Schreiner
To Vera Brittain and some of her contemporaries, Women and Labour was the Bible of the Women's Movement. It influenced the writings of many early-twentieth-century feminists, including historian Alice Clark and suffragette Constance Lytton
Literary responses Olive Schreiner
OS 's writings were promptly translated into French, German, Dutch, Spanish, Russian, Japanese and Chinese, and rapidly achieved high world-wide sales.
Stanley, Liz. “Encountering the Imperial and Colonial Past through Olive Schreiner’s <span data-tei-ns-tag="tei_title" data-tei-title-lvl=‘m’>Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland</span&gt”;. Women’s Writing, Vol.
7
, No. 2, pp. 197-19.
198
Constance Lytton felt that more than any other author,OSrightly interpreted the...
Literary responses Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The donor, Mildred Ella Mansel , called it a wonderful book that had just come out. The recipient, Constance Lytton , read it right through that night and agreed with Mansel's description. She particularly admired...
Literary responses Emily Lawless
While EL self-effacingly suggested that her horticultural representation of Ireland is a pleasurable childishness,
Lawless, Emily. A Garden Diary. Methuen, 1901.
125
critic Elizabeth Grubgeld argues that her representation of personal history and cultural heritage in her garden and her Garden Diary...
Literary responses Olive Schreiner
The book was a particular delight to women readers, but its popularity extended to people of both genders and all classes. Lady Constance Lytton later recalled that her father and the artist George Frederic Watts
politics Charlotte Despard
Lady Constance Lytton recorded how CD (whose leadership qualities she warmly admired) was committed to Holloway Prison early in 1909. She described the meeting there between Despard and Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence , when the two women's...
politics Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence
The police refused to allow her to enter the House, and since she then refused to leave they arrested her. In her autobiography she describes the process of arresting suffragists as routine: she and the...
Reception Ethel Smyth
ES was famous or notorious in her day. According to Constance Lytton , E. F. Benson painted her portrait as Edith Staines in his novel Dodo. A detail of the day, 1893, whose title...
Residence Olive Schreiner
A few years later Constance Lytton thought this the most dreary place my eyes had ever beheld, a dry barren valley that froze up my powers of enjoyment with its overpowering immensity, monotony and dreariness...

Timeline

October 1907
Votes for Women, the official organ of the Women's Social and Political Union , began publication in London.
18 September 1909
Women's Social and Political Union members Mary Leigh and Charlotte Marsh , imprisoned in Winson Green , Birmingham, began fasting; they were ordered by Home Secretary Herbert Gladstone to be forcibly fed.
April 1910
The National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies passed a resolution supporting the Conciliation Bill proposed by the Conciliation Committee .
1913
Norway passed a Woman Suffrage Act (following the similar Act passed by Finland in 1906).
6 July 1928
Four days after the Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act received the royal assent, a celebratory breakfast was held at the Hotel Cecil in London.
1943
Lady Eve Balfour , an early proponent of organic farming (an earl's daughter whose dazzling family connections made her a descendant of the writer Rosina Bulwer Lytton and niece of the suffragists Frances Balfour and...

Texts

Lytton, Constance. "No Votes for Women": A Reply to Some Recent Anti-suffrage Publications. A. C. Fifield, 1909.
Lytton, Constance. Letters of Constance Lytton. Editor Elizabeth Edith, Countess of Balfour, Heinemann, 1925.
Elizabeth Edith, Countess of Balfour, 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.
Lytton, Constance. Prisons and Prisoners. Heinemann, 1914.
Lytton, Constance. Prisons and Prisoners. Cambridge University Press, 2010. http://www.cambridge.org/series/sSeries.asp?code=CLOR, http://www.cambridge.org/series/sSeries.asp?code=CLOR.