Lady Caroline Elizabeth Sarah Sheridan Norton
(1808-1877)
Lady Caroline Norton was a novelist and poet who became an inadvertent but crucial feminist upon her husband's divorcing her.
Norton, the granddaughter of a playwright (Richard Sheridan) and the daughter of a novelist (Caroline Henrietta Sheridan) came from a literary family, and began writing at a young age. Her renowned beauty attracted the attentions of George Norton; with no dowry, and after some hesitation, she accepted his hand.
Unfortunately, he was slow-witted, violent, and unfaithful, while his wife was strong-willed, independent, clever, and passionate. The marriage was an immediate failure, although it dragged on, with repeated estrangements and reunions, for some time (long enough to yield three sons). The Sheridans detested George, who physically abused his wife even in her third trimester of pregnancy.
At the same time as the Nortons' marriage was disintegrating, Caroline was enjoying the beginnings of her literary fame, and also began a platonic but scandalous friendship with Lord Melbourne (whose career assistance George sought, for which reason he encouraged the friendship). Her poetry matured, and she turned to novel-writing as well; admiring contemporaries compared her poetry to Byron's and E. B. Browning's.
In 1836, the Norton marriage finally collapsed. George took the children and left, hiding them with various relations of his, and refusing Caroline admittance. He then sued Lord Melbourne (then Prime Minister) for "criminal conversation" - meaning adultery with his wife. George's motivation was at least partly political, as the PM was a Whig, and George a Tory, but vindictive delight in damaging his wife's reputation must have been the primary cause.
The case was self-evidently a sham, and Melbourne was
almost immediately acquitted, but in spite of Caroline's complete vindication,
her reputation was ruined; to this day, some historians and biographers refer to
her as the scandalous Caroline Norton, and cite young men's friendships with her
as evidence that they had fallen into bad company and were leading fast and
dissipated lives. The truth is merely that Norton was now, through
no choice of her own, forced to become an independent and self-reliant woman,
alone in the world. Her success and strength of character were, to a
certain cast of Victorian mind, somehow necessarily linked to sexuality; hence,
she must have been profligate. In fact, biographers who specialize
in Norton believe her to have been perfectly celibate until her second marriage
in 1877 (at the age of 69 years). Sexual mores have, happily, changed
since the 19th century, so that it seems odd to congratulate Norton on four
decades of enforced chastity; but what her story illustrates is the ease with
which female power and independence have been associated with sexuality; and the
fact that this connection exists in many people's minds perhaps helps to explain
why humankind has expended so much energy across the centuries and the
continents in controlling female sexuality. 
To return. Although George had lost his lawsuit, he was still legally entitled to keep his children from his wife, which he did, to Caroline's astonishment and horror. The Dictionary of Literary Biography adds, "She also lost her inheritance; copyright earnings from years of publication; her clothing, jewelry, letters, and other personal possessions." Norton immediately began researching British law concerning wives, and was appalled by what she discovered. In the British legal system, a married woman had literally no legal existence. The term for this status was "femme covert" (French), literally, the woman's existence was covered by her husband's. Consequently, a married woman could own no property, could not be sued, could not be held accountable for any debts she might accrue, had no right to her children, and, needless to say, could not vote. Since the woman's identity was absorbed in her husband's, any money that she earned or children that she bore had no legal custodian but the husband.
George, thick in so many ways, apparently had qualified legal advisers, because he made use of all of the implications of the law in the years that followed. in the first place, as already mentioned, he refused Caroline access to her children, even when one of her sons was fatally ill. Caroline was largely responsible, through her pamphleteering and networking, for the passing of the Infant Custody Bill (1839), which allowed mothers to petition for custody of their children. George then moved the children to Scotland, where English law did not apply, and kept Caroline from her children for 2 more years.
After the death of their youngest son, George allowed his wife partial custody of the two remaining children. In 1848, Caroline signed a legal separation with her husband, which provided her with a small allowance; however, when she received small legacies from both her mother and Lord Melbourne, George stopped payment of the allowance. When Caroline researched her legal position, she discovered that the agreement she had signed had no legal validity, since she, the signatory, was a woman. In 1854, Norton published what might reasonably be called the fruits of her bitter experience, English Laws for Women in the Nineteenth Century. This pamphlet explained to women their legal position in clear and non-legalistic language. Norton also continued to lobby energetically for reform of England's laws, and enjoyed the satisfaction of the passage of the Marriage and Divorce Act of 1857, which granted women a separate legal existence from their husbands and enabled them to control their own income.
Norton's feminism was, from the first, unwilling. She explicitly disassociated herself from early 19th-century feminists. Circumstances, however, forced her to an awareness of the deeply prejudicial status of women in England, and her unstinting resolve in the face of that awareness made her the first famous Victorian feminist heroine.
Information drawn from:
Dan Albergotti, "Caroline Norton," in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 199: Victorian Women Poets. A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book. Edited by William B. Thesing, University of South Carolina. The Gale Group, 1999, pp. 216-223.
Kathryn Ledbetter, Oklahoma Baptist University
in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 159: British Short-Fiction Writers, 1800-1880. A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book. Edited by John R. Greenfield, McKendree College. The Gale Group, 1996. pp. 242-249.
Most of Norton's poetry is available to UT students at the English Poetry Database: http://epoetry.lib.utexas.edu/cgi-bin/epoetry
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