Life
1808-1877 [Caroline Elizabeth Sarah, née Sheridan; Hon. Mrs. Norton]; b. London; grand-daughter of R.
B. Sheridan, sister of Lady Dufferin; m. Hon. Geoge [Chapple] Norton, br. of Lord Grantley, with whom 2 sons Fletcher and Brinsley;
several separations ensued, in each case caused by Norton’s domestic violence; Norton sues for criminal conversation citing Lord Melbourne as correspondent, May 1836; case, held 23 June, collapses in spite of bribed servants; Mrs. Norton denied access to divorce in view of findings of Norton v. Melbourne; refused sight
of her children for 6 years by her husband; sets about changing custody laws by means of Infant Custody Bill; agreed to disadvantageous settlement, 1848; received allowance of £200 p.a. in Melbourne’s will and later a sum of £480 p.a. in her own mother’s will, secured against Norton; finds her husband not constrained by law to pay the agreed allowance of £200, 1851; applauded for dramatic court speech in Thrupps v. Norton, a case concerning the non-payment of a bill which she referred to her husband, 18 Aug. 1853; began to write her pamphlets
on women’s right to custody of children and private property when her income was sequestered by her
husband; published English Law for Women in the Nineteenth Century (1854) and A Letter to the Queen on Lord Chancellor Cranworth’s Marriage and Divorce Bill (1855), which was quoted in debate in parliament, the The Married Woman's Property and Divorce Act
(1857) including sections from her
A Review of the Divorce Bill of 1856 [...] (1857);
eldest son Fletcher d. of tuberculosis, Lisborn 1859; issued long poems incl. The Lady of La Garaye ( 1862) and fiction incl. The Wife and Woman’s
Reward (1836), Tales and Sketches ( 1850), Lost and Saved (1865), and Old Sir Douglas (1867); George Norton d., 1875; Mrs. Norton’s second son Brinsley succeeds to Grantley title on death of Norton’s br., also 1875; m.
Sir. W. Stirling-Maxwell, 1877; lived in London and Hampton Court; d. 15 June; there
is a unfinished portrait by George Watts in the National Gallery of Ireland.PI DIW DIL CAB DNB RAF JMC SUTH OCIL.
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Works
[Anon,] The Sorrows of Rosalie: A Tale, with Other Poems (1829); Undying
One, and Other Poems (1830), eds. 1830, 1853; Poems (Boston 1833);
The Wife and Woman’s Reward (1836), and Do. [another edn.] (1836); The
Separation of Mother and Child by the Law of Custody of Infants Considered
(1838); A Plain Letter to the Lord Chancellor on the Infant Custody
Bill (n.d.), and Do. [another edn.] (NY 1922); The Dream and Other Poems
(London: H. Colburn 1840), and Do. [another edn.] (1841); Lines [on the ‘young
Queen’ Victoria’] (London: Saunders & Otley 1840); Letters
&c., dated from June 1836 to July 1841, 3 pt[s] (London [priv.]
?1841); The Child of the Islands, a poem (London 1845), and Do. [another
edn.] (London: Chapman & Hall 1846); Fisher’s Drawing-Room Scrap-book,
with poetical illustrations by Mrs N[orton] (London 1846-49); Aunt Carry’s
Ballads for Children; Adventures of a Wood Sprite; The Story
of Blanche and Brutikin (London: J. Cundall 1847); Letters to the
Mob, by Libertas (1848); A Residence at Sierra Leone, ed. (1849);
The Martyr, a trag. in verse (1849); Tales and Sketches in prose
and Verse (London 1850); Love Not, a Song (?1850); Stuart
of Dunleath, a Story of Modern Times, 3 vols. (London 1851), another
ed. 2 vols. (1851), another ed. [The Parlour Library Series, vol. 90]
(1853); English Laws for Women for in the Nineteenth Century (London
priv. 1854); A Letter to the Queen on Lord Chancellor Cranworth’s
Marriage and Divorce Bill (London 1855); Remarks on the Law of
Marriage and divorce; suggested by the Hon. Mrs Norton’s Letter to
the Queen (Lond 1855), another ed., with appendix (London 1856); The
Centenary Festival, Verses on Robert Burns (London 1859);, reprinted
from The Daily Scotsman, another ed, called The Burns Centenary
Poems (1859); The Lady of L Garaye, A Poem (Cambridge 1862; Cambridge & London 1862 [3rd Edn.]), and Do. [another edn.] (London: Macmillan & Co. 1866), 153pp.; [another edn.] (NY: Anson
D. F. Randolph [?1865]); Lost and Saved, 3 vols. (London:
Hurst & Blackett 1863) [novel], and Do. [4th Edn.] (1863), and Do. [another edn.] 2 vols.
(1863); and Do. [other edns. ([1864], 1865); [semi-anon.,] Home Thoughts and
Home Scenes, Poems, Hon. Mrs Norton, contributor (1865); Old Sir Douglas, 3 vols. (London 1867), and Do. [another edn.] (1868), and Do. [another
edn.], 2 vols. (1867), and Do. [another edn.] (1868); ed., The Rose of Jericho (1870); Bingen on the Rhine, a Poem (London: J. Walker & Co.
[1888]); Some Unrecorded Letters of Caroline Norton in the Altschul
collection of the yale University Library, ed. Bertha Coolidge (Boston:
priv. 1934.)
Edited vols. (Thomas Carlyle), C. E. Norton, ed., Carlyle’s Reminiscences of My Irish Journey in 1849 [1st edn. 1882] (1887); also Norton ed., Carlyle’s Correspondence with Goethe (1887); Do., with Emerson (1883), and 4 vols. of letters (1888) [Chk.]
Collected Works, Collected Writings of Caroline Norton (1808-1877), circa 8 reels of 35mm. silver-halide pos. microfilm [Adam Matthew Publ., Oxford St., Marlborough, Wiltshire, England, SN8 1AP.]
Digitised Works at Victorian Women Writers Project / Indiana University [link.]
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Criticism
Alan Chedzoy, Scandalous Woman: The Story of Caroline Norton (Allison & Busby 1992; Virgin 1992), 312pp.
Elaine Showalter, A Literature of their Own (1984), p.140.
[Q. auth.,] review of Alan Chedzoy, Scandalous Woman: The Story of Caroline Norton (Virgin 1992), 312pp; in Sunday Telegraph ( 26 July 1992).
Jonathan Keates, review of Alan Chedzoy, Scandalous Woman, The Story of Caroline Norton (Allison & Busby 1992), Times Literary Supplement 20 Nov. 1992, p.32.
Vincent Cheng (James Joyce and Empire, Cambridge UP 1995), quotes Harry Stone on Caroline Norton, author of “The Arab’s Farewell to his Steed”, p.100; chap. end.
Mary Mark Ockerbloom, ‘A Celebration of Women Writers: Caroline Norton’, at Univ. of Pennsylvania Digital Library: [link.]
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Notes
Arthur Quiller Couch, ed., Oxford Book of English Verse,
1250-1918 (new ed. 1929), item 694. BIBL, rep., Norton, A Voice from
the Factories, 1836 [Revolution and Romanticism 1789-1834] (Spelsbury:
Woodstock Bks. 1994), 40pp.
D. J. O’Donoghue, Poets of Ireland (Dublin: Hodges Figgis 1912), lists The Sorrows of Rosalie, poems (anon. 1829); Poems (Boston 1833); The Martyr, trag. (1849); A Voice from Factories, verse (Lon 1836); Home Thoughts and Home Scenes (anon. 1865); first husband died in 1869 and she remarried to Stirling-Maxwell.
Charles Read, ed., A Cabinet of Irish Literature (3 vols., 1876-78), lists Sorrows of Rosalie (1829); Undying One, poem (1830); The Child of the Islands; Stuart of Dunleath; Lost and Saved; Old Sir Douglas; Martyr. La Guraye is a poem, not a novel as DIW says. DIL has a fuller biographical source than the others. Justin McCarthy, Irish Lit., gives ‘Arab’s Farewell’, ‘I do not love thee’, and three others.
John Sutherland, The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction (Longmans 1988; rep. 1989), lists The Sorrows of Rosalie (1829); author publicised as female Byron; the episode of her husband’s divorce suit against Lord Melbourne may have inspired Dickens’s Bardell v. Pickwick; social problems poetry followed (A Voice from the Factories, and The Child of the Islands); struggle for custody of children; Stuart of Dunleath, subtitle, ‘A Story of Modern Times,’ autobiographical, and reviewed by Athenaeum in these terms, ‘a tale of trial accumulated upon one poor woman’s head more melancholy than this novel is not within our recollection’; her husband even sought her copyrights as his property. [BL 4]. Note separate entry under Diana of the Crossways, Meredith (1885), Diana Antonia Merion, vivacious Irish orphan, m. Augustus Warwick, retired barrister, separates on groundless suspicion of affair with political grandee; unsuccessful legal action against her; she later engages with a rising young politician, Sir Percy Dacier, and finally united with her admirer Thomas Redworth who has bailed her out in trouble; remarks, ‘the novel is notable for its spirited depiction of female sexual adventurism [...] based, as many contemporary readers immediately appreciated, on Caroline Norton [...] enjoyed considerable success.’
Dictionary of National Biography, her pamphlets on custody of children and female earnings contributed to the amelioration of women’s conditions.
Justin McCarthy, ed., Irish Literature (Washington: Catholic Univ. of America 1904), biog. details as above; cites Sorrows of Rosalie, praised enthusiastically by Christopher North in Noctes Ambrosianae, and by James Hogg; The Undying One (1830), concerns the Wandering Jew; A Voice from the Factories; letters to the Times on factory slavery issued in 1841; long poem Lady of La Garaya [sic]; novels, Stuart of Dunleath; Lost and Saved; and Old Sir Douglas; also a trag., The Martyr, tales, and a book on Sierra Leone.
Victorian Women Writers Project (Indiana U.) holds digital copies of The Child of the Islands (1846); The Dream and Other Poems (1840); English Laws for Women in the Nineteenth Century (1854); The Lady of La Garaye (1866); A Letter to the Queen on Lord Chancellor Cranworth's Marriage and Divorce Bill (1855); Letters to the Mob (1848); A Plain Letter to the Lord Chancellor on the Infant Custody Bill (1839); The Undying One and Other Poems (1830); A Voice from the Factories (1836).
Belfast Central Public Library holds M. S. Norton, Lady of La Guraye (1871), and Tales and Sketches (1850).
Diana of the Crossways: Caroline Norton is the model for Meredith’s Diana of the Crossways [summarised OCEL, p. 271]. See Geoffrey
Taylor, Irish Poets of the 19th c.(1951). Peter Kavanagh, The
Irish Theatre (1946) cites the Hon. Carloline Norton, 1807-1862; The
Martyr (1849), unacted.
W. B. Yeats: When Yeats first described Maud Gonne to John O’Leary, he called her ‘very Irish, a kind of “Diana of the Crossways”’, in reference to Meredith’s novel purportedly based on Caroline Norton; see Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 1986, p.127; cited in Terence Brown, W. B. Yeats: A Critical Life, 1999, p.48; also in , cited in Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks, 1948, p.104.)
James Joyce: Her ‘Arab’s Farewell to His Steed’ is cited in Joyce’s Dubliners, though in not particularly Irish spirit.
‘A Celebration of Women Writers: Caroline Norton’, at Univ. of Pennsylvania Digital Library, containing chaps.: Bibliography; The Three Graces [Sheridan sisters]; An Unfortunate Marriage; The School For Scandal; The Infant Custody Bill; In Honour, But Not in Law; The Married Woman’s Property and Divorce Act; Lost and Saved. (Copy in Victorian Women Writers Project, Indiana Univ.
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)