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.
The starting-point for the poem is the tradition (subtly questioned) of Sappho's suicide as an abandoned woman; this fact links the text to other responses to the topic by other women poets including Felicia Hemans
Intertextuality and Influence
Julia O'Faolain
The topics covered in richly informative detail, far too many to enumerate, include a father's life-or-death rights over his offspring in ancient Greece, while such topics as buying and selling sex, or the relation...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Byron
and Wordsworth
were important poetic influences. Books that Elizabeth Barrett owned and kept until her death included Philip James Bailey
's Festus, A Poem, a major text of the spasmodic school, L. E. L.
Intertextuality and Influence
Sappho
Elizabeth Moody
engagingly converts Sappho
into a contemporary in Sappho Burns her Books and Cultivates the Culinary Arts, 1798.
Jay, Peter, and Caroline Lewis. Sappho Through English Poetry. Anvil Press Poetry, 1996.
98
But many women poets accepted the notion of her rejected love for Phaon: Robinson
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Gaskell
Fallen women were by then a cultural obsession. Caroline Bowles
had treated the subject in Ellen Fitzarthur (1820). Thomas Hood
had depicted both the exploitation of seamstresses in The Song of the Shirt (1843) and...
Intertextuality and Influence
Anna Atkins
Though AA
's preface concedes the the talent, the ingenuity, the very clever writing of sensation-authors,
Atkins, Anna. A Page from the Peerage. T. Cautley Newby, 1863, 2 vols.
i
it also hints that they are in it for the money, and expresses outrage at what it sees...
Intertextuality and Influence
Maria Theresa Longworth
She was not the only one to find inspiration for writing in her court experience. In addition to widespread newspaper coverage and several reports of the trials themselves, other creative responses continued to appear. J. R. O'Flanagan
Intertextuality and Influence
Catherine Gore
In an extraordinary passage near the end of the book, Cecil lists a number of people who might, if they could only work together, revolutionize the country.
qtd. in
Farrell, John P. “Toward a New History of Fiction: The Wolff Collection and the Example of Mrs. Gore”. The Library Chronicle of the University of Texas at Austin, Vol.
37
, 1986, pp. 28-37.
36
The names he mentions include actual...
Intertextuality and Influence
Ruby M. Ayres
Dark Gentleman carries an unascribed epigraph from Caroline Norton
: Until I truly loved—I was alone.
Ayres, Ruby M. Dark Gentleman. Hodder and Stoughton, 1953.
title-page
Its title is the name given by Judith Anson to Simon Trenchard, with whom at last she achieves...
Intertextuality and Influence
Rosina Bulwer Lytton Baroness Lytton
It had been written in 1866 but was not published for almost fifteen years (perhaps for fear of being sued for libel). One of her other life-writing texts was called Nemesis. She claimed that...
Literary responses
Eliza Cook
An 1848 preface to a US edition of her poems ranked EC
's popularity almost as high as that of Felicia Hemans
or Caroline Norton
. It characterises her work in terms of emotion and...
Literary responses
Charlotte Brontë
Harriet Martineau
, finding the work attributed to herself even by members of her own family, felt that the unknown author must know not only my books but myself very well. . . . With...
Literary responses
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
H. N. Coleridge
in his survey of Modern English Poetesses in the Quarterly Review in 1840 ranked EBB
second of nine (after Caroline Norton
) and offered some sharp criticism as well as admiration. This...
Literary responses
Christina Rossetti
The London Review was very positive, considering the writing the genuine utterance of a richly imaginative mind and of a very high order.
qtd. in
Marsh, Jan. Christina Rossetti: A Writer’s Life. Viking, 1995.
28
The Spectator talked about CR
's genius and artistic discrimination. Other...
Literary responses
Ellen Wood
Early discussions of EW
as a sensation writer often linked her writing to that of Mary Elizabeth Braddon
, despite the two authors' vastly different styles and perspectives. In 1863 a review of Our Female...
