Definition
Caroline Norton (1808–1877) enjoyed a varied and prolific career as an author. She was well known as a popular poet, novelist, and editor as well as a controversial polemicist. Norton pioneered political activism to protect the legal status of mothers and wives, and her efforts led to the first statutory limitations on the powers granted to husbands under the principle of coverture. This entry provides an overview of her life and work, focusing particularly on how scandal, celebrity, and her intervention into political debate shaped her reputation during her lifetime and afterwards. In addition, the discussion addresses how recent scholarly interest in her political essays on the legal disabilities of women has energised reevaluations of her literary work.
Introduction
Caroline Norton (1808–1877) – poet, novelist, editor, and polemist – embodied the talents and beauty of her paternal grandparents, Richard Sheridan (1751–1816) and Elizabeth Ann Linley Sheridan (1754–1792)....
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References
Acland, Alice. 1948. Caroline Norton. London: Constable.
Atkinson, Diane. 2012. The criminal conversation of Mrs. Norton. London: Arrow Books.
Chase, Karen, and Michael Levenson. 2000. The trials of Caroline Norton, poetry, publicity, and the Prime Minister. In The spectacle of intimacy: A public life for the Victorian family, 21–45. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Chedzoy, Alan. 1992. A scandalous woman: The story of Caroline Norton. London: Allison & Busby.
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Fitzgerald, Percy. 1886. The lives of the Sheridans. London: R. Bentley and Son.
Fluhr, Nicole. 2009. The letter and the law, or how Caroline Norton (Re)Wrote female subjectivity. Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 28 (1): 37–55.
Hoagwood, Terence Allan, and Kathryn Ledbetter. 2005. “Colour’d Shadows”: Contexts in publishing, printing, and reading nineteenth-century British women writers. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Kaiserman, Aaron S. 2015. ‘Wandering through Bowers Beloved’: The wandering Jew and the woman poet in Caroline Norton’s The Undying One. Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies 11: 1. http://www.ncgsjournal.com/issue111/kaiserman.htm.
Martineau, Harriet. 1877, 1983. Autobiography. London: Virago.
Perkins, Jane Gray. 1909. The life of Mrs. Norton. London: J. Murray.
Poovey, Mary. 1989. Covered but not bound: Caroline Norton and the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act. In Uneven developments: The ideological work of gender in mid-Victorian England, 51–88. London: Virago Press.
Prins, Yopie. 1999. Personifying the poetess: Caroline Norton, ‘The Picture of Sappho’. In Women’s poetry, late romantic to late victorian: Gender and genre, 1830–1900, ed. Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain, 50–67. London: St. Martin’s Press.
Savage, Gail. 2017. Caroline Norton (1808–1877): The injured wife, scandal, and the politics of feminist memory. In Biographical misrepresentations of British women writers: A hall of mirrors and the long nineteenth century, ed. Brenda Ayres, 169–188. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
Strachey, Ray. 1928, 1969. The cause. Port Washington: Kennikat Press.
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Savage, G. (2019). Norton, Caroline. In: The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women's Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02721-6_80-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02721-6_80-1
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