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.
GM
's prolific career as a poet and novelist spanned four decades and established him as a important British literary figure. He published his first collection of poetry, Poems (1851), at his own expense. It...
politics
Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon
In her diary, Smith wrote that she hoped that Mill would take up the cause of women's rights.
Herstein, Sheila R. A Mid-Victorian Feminist: Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon. Yale University Press, 1985.
18
She was also said to have been pointed in the direction of women's causes by the...
politics
Harriett Mozley
HM
was one of those for whom religion and politics were hardly distinguishable. In 1832, during the time leading up to the Reform Bill, she sounds like a Tory in politics as she observes with...
Publishing
Mary Russell Mitford
Caroline Norton
's Court Magazine printed a story by MRM
.
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, 1870, 2 vols.
2: 144
Reception
Eliza Cook
Reynolds's Miscellany printed an illustration of Lady Blessington
, Eliza Cook
, and Caroline Norton
. Cook, in an open shirt and dark jacket, wears plainer and less feminine dress than the other two, whose...
Reception
Isa Craig
IC
's poem was chosen from among six hundred entries; other contestants included the working-class poet Gerald Massey
and diarist Arthur Munby
. Caroline Norton
, visiting Edinburgh that year, had also written a poetic...
Reception
Charlotte Maria Tucker
CMT
, whose works sold very well, was regarded as a major female author during the mid-Victorian period. She was incensed when in 1882 some one wrote a sketch of her life, and requested her...
Textual Features
Rosina Bulwer Lytton Baroness Lytton
The book's satire on parliament
for its treatment of women was highly topical at a date two years after the new Divorce Act, three years after the Married Women's Property Committee
was formed, and during...
Textual Features
Mary Stott
Here MS
writes grippingly of her own life, and illuminatingly about myriad subjects of public or cultural interest: the lives, customs, and deaths of newspapers, the conspiracy of silence about sex which had not dissipated...
The protagonist, Phoebe, is only sixteen when she marries the twenty-year-old student Sherrard Barrington, who then goes abroad to earn money for their support, leaving her to live with her mother and their daughter. Phoebe...
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.
