Norton, Caroline Elizabeth Sarah (Sheridan)

Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature by John W. Cousin

(1808-1877)


Grand-daughter of Richard Brinsley S. (q.v.), m. in 1827 the Hon. G.C. Norton, a union which turned out most unhappy, and ended in a separation. Her first book, The Sorrows of Rosalie (1829), was well received. The Undying One (1830), a romance founded upon the legend of the Wandering Jew, followed, and other novels were Stuart of Dunleath (1851), Lost and Saved (1863), and Old Sir Douglas (1867). The unhappiness of her married life led her to interest herself in the amelioration of the laws regarding the social condition and the separate property of women and the wrongs of children, and her poems, A Voice from the Factories (1836), and The Child of the Islands (1845), had as an object the furtherance of her views on these subjects. Her efforts were largely successful in bringing about the needed legislation. In 1877 Mrs. N. m. Sir W. Stirling Maxwell (q.v.).

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