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.
Her literary friends included Alfred Henry Forrester
(Alfred Crowquill), for whose album she wrote a poem, and William Jerdan
, who gave her valuable advice about her work. She visited with American poet...
Friends, Associates
Charlotte Guest
CG
's friends included Benjamin Disraeli
(with whom she shared poetical enthusiasms before her first marriage), and her cousin Henry Layard
, who became famous as an archaeologist (the discoverer of ancient Nineveh) and who...
In her youth MCH
's family associated with various prominent figures. Living close to John Wilson Croker
, she became acquainted with many literary people, including Theodore Hook
and the family of Caroline Norton
...
Friends, Associates
Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan
In London in 1824 she had a socially unsuccessful meeting with Wordsworth
, who was by now a thorough reactionary in politics. He went to some pains to snub her; she refused to notice this...
Living once again with her parents in London, Lucie Austin began an active social life. She was introduced to Queen Victoria
, met and became friendly with Caroline Norton
, and was introduced to...
Mary Russell Mitford
was another who knew FK
well even apart from their connection through the theatre.
Mitford, Mary Russell. The Life of Mary Russell Mitford: Told by Herself in Letters To Her Friends. Editor L’Estrange, Alfred Guy Kingham, Harper and Brothers.
2: 119-20
Other friends from this period or soon afterwards included the future poet and novelist Caroline Norton
Friends, Associates
Emily Eden
Lady Emily Cowper had tried to influence her brother's life before: over his marriage to the novelist Lady Caroline Lamb
(who had died four years before this), and over his relationship, already begun, with another...
Friends, Associates
L. E. L.
By the time LEL began living alone, she was well-known in literary circles. She became a good friend of Emma Roberts
and Rosina Bulwer-Lytton
around this time, and gradually became a recognized London public figure...
Friends, Associates
Eliza Lynn Linton
Eliza Lynn met a number of women authors who were once applauded but later complacently forgotten . . . . as literary fossils.
Linton, Eliza Lynn, and Beatrice Harraden. My Literary Life. Hodder and Stoughton.
85
She contended that Women who wrote were then few and far...
Friends, Associates
Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, first Baron Lytton