The Narratives of Caroline Norton (review)

For someone whose poetry appeared in dozens of anthologies during the nineteenth century, Caroline Norton attracted surprisingly little attention for much of the twentieth. There were biographies in 1909, 1948, and 1992, James O. Hoge and Clarke Olney's edited collection, The Letters of Caroline Norton to Lord Melbourne (1974), Hoge and Jane Marcus's edited Selected Writings of Caroline Norton (1978), and then, in the 1980s, a rush of feminist interest. Although Norton edited the Keepsake as well as La Belle Assemblée (under its post-1832 title the Court Magazine) and wrote poetry, fiction, and political pamphlets, she is most famous as a society beauty, victimized by her husband's notorious "criminal conversation" suit against the Prime Minister, his refusal to let her to see the children, and the money troubles that arose from a man's right to his wife's property.

Randall Craig's The Narratives of Caroline Norton is not a biography, not literary criticism, not an analysis of political influence or a report of scandals, but all and none of these. It draws on portraits by John Hayter, Daniel Maclise, Edward Landseer, and others; the fiction and poems Norton published both before and after her public infamy in 1836; novels and plays that fictionalized elements of her life (including Vanity Fair [1847-48], The Newcomes [1853-55], Diana of the Crossways [1885], Phineas Finn [1869], and Endymion [1880]), as well as Victorian letters, lives, periodicals, contexts, scenes, cultural plots, and archetypes, all arranged under three topics: authorship, law, and politics.

The first chapter depicts Norton as a silver-fork character, immersed in society (and appearing briefly in a novel by Lady Blessington) while also earning her living through annuals produced for and about the fashionable world. Craig reveals the skillful stereotypes and ridicule in verse Norton wrote even before she was "out" in society and describes her own silver-fork novels from the 1830s and 1840s. He also points out the links between Norton and William Makepeace Thackeray, who were friends from the early 1840s: the parallels in their life stories and social positions, the significance of her influence on him, and the evidence suggesting the relationship between Norton and Becky Sharp.

The next chapter turns to later narratives. Norton's novel Lost and Saved (1863) was reviewed in Christian Remembrancer under the title "Our Female Sensation Novelists," which also treated Lady Audley's Secret (1862), Aurora Floyd (1863), East Lynne (1861), and Verner's Pride (1863). Since Norton's protagonist, Beatrice Brooke, is a true rarity in sensation fiction—the mother of an illegitimate child who nevertheless achieves happiness as the wife of a virtuous man—the book aroused moral censure. Instead of resting silently, she responded to a Times review of 22 May 1863 with a long letter published on 18 June. Furthermore, Craig points out that elements in Lost and Saved are adapted from Norton's first long poem, The Sorrows of Rosalie (published in 1829, two years after her marriage) and that in returning to its themes, settings, and symbolic landscapes she not only referenced sensation plots and melodramatic formulas but also dramatized women's need for legal reforms.

The book is organized as a collage rather than by chronology or thesis: George Norton's criminal conversation suit against Melbourne in June 1836, the breach-of-promise suit in The Pickwick Papers (1836-37)—Charles Dickens had been in court during Norton v. Melbourne as a reporter—Caroline's own satirical breach-of-promise trial in Woman's Reward (1835), another case in W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan's Trial by Jury (1875), the process of divorce in The Newcomes and Diana of the Crossways. Norton's personal account of domestic violence in English Laws for Women in the Nineteenth Century (privately printed in 1854) is followed by examples from her novels Woman's Reward and Stuart of Dunleath (1851), followed by an analysis that makes no direct assertion about the relationship: "Unhappy couples...