Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Caroline Norton
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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.
Since this year, 2007, CR
has been picking a Poem of the Week for the Guardian newspaper, which prints the poem along with her commentary and analysis. Rumens like to pay attention to context and...
Textual Production
Georgiana Fullerton
Critical or popular attention has been less forthcoming in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and there has been little revival of GF
's work, although the US firm Garland
reprinted some of her novels in...
Textual Production
Ellen Wood
Some ten years after the novel's publication, Caroline Norton
in a letter to the Times claimed EW
had used one of her early stories as the basis of East Lynne.
“The Times Digital Archive 1785-2007”. Thompson Gale: The Times Digital Archive.
(25 October 1871): 6
Textual Production
Caroline Clive
The Morlas begins with a note in which the author states that this poem has lain by me all the best years of my life. She had, she says, revised it on the specific advice...
Textual Production
Ellen Wood
Claiming to have written the story for one of the once fashionable race of Annuals, now extinct,
“The Times Digital Archive 1785-2007”. Thompson Gale: The Times Digital Archive.
(25 October 1871): 6
and having intended to expand and republish it as a three-volume novel, Norton
Library catalogues all have the period of her editorship as 1841-1850.
Solo: Search Oxford University Libraries Online. 18 July 2011, http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=OXVU1&fromLogin=true&reset_config=true.
Feldman, Paula R., editor. British Women Poets of the Romantic Era. John Hopkins University Press, 1997.
150
Textual Production
Ellen Wood
EW
had also been also accused of plagiarizing the plot of East Lynne from Anne Marsh
's The Admiral's Daughter, in which another erring wife returns unrecognised to her husband's house. In her Times...
Textual Production
Caroline Bowles
The book preceded Caroline Norton
's A Voice from the Factories by three years. It includes a dedication to economist and social reformer Michael Thomas Sadler
, who fought to improve child labour conditions. Bowles...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Lucille Iremonger
Her opening chapter addresses her own experience, with heartfelt reminiscence about the impact of political campaigning on married life. She sets out to combat the view of the candidate's (later the member's) wife either as...
In the plot, Jim is suspected in the murder of a policeman, but later becomes sensibly disillusioned with repeal. Grace improves her natural goodness by reading the Bible in an almost Protestant manner. She ministers...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Charles Dickens
The first issues contained loosely linked, picaresque, and quite satirical episodes resulting from the travels of Mr Pickwick and members of his eponymous club. As The Pickwick Papers progressed, the linearity of the plot strengthened...
