Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Constance Lytton
-
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.
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.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 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
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...
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
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
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
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 Schreiners Trooper Peter Halket of MashonalandWomens Writing, Vol.
7
, No. 2, 2000, 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...
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...
King, Elspeth. “The Scottish Women’s Suffrage Movement”. Out of Bounds: Women in Scottish Society 1800-1945, edited by Esther Breitenbach and Eleanor Gordon, Edinburgh University Press, 1992, pp. 121-50.
139
18 September 1909: Women's Social and Political Union members...
Hume, Leslie Parker. The National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, 1897-1914. Garland, 1982.
70
Lytton, Constance. Prisons and Prisoners. Heinemann, 1914.
311-12
1913: Norway passed a Woman Suffrage Act (following...
National or international item
1913
Norway passed a Woman Suffrage Act (following the similar Act passed by Finland in 1906).
Forster, Margaret. Significant Sisters. Secker and Warburg, 1984.
prelims
“International Woman Suffrage Timeline”. About.com: Women’s History.
Lytton, Constance. Prisons and Prisoners. Heinemann, 1914.
126
6 July 1928: Four days after the Representation of the...
Building item
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.
“July 6, 1928, Celebrating full women’s suffrage”. Guardian Weekly, 6 July 2007, p. 20.
20
1943: Lady Eve Balfour, an early proponent of organic...
Building item
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 Balfour, Elizabeth Edith, Countess of, Heinemann, 1925.
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.
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.
