Book: The Case Of The Married Woman: Caroline Norton And Her Fight For Women’s Justice
Author: Antonia Fraser
Publisher: Pegasus
Price: $28.95
The life of a major Victorian writer and social reformer, both celebrated and criticised in her own time, warrants serious attention. However, Caroline Norton (1808-1877) had largely been forgotten by posterity until the current interest in recovering female figures from the past. This oversight has now been remedied by the installation of a blue plaque for Norton’s house in Mayfair and publications like Antonia Fraser’s The Case of the Married Woman.
Caroline Norton was the granddaughter of the Irish satirist, playwright, and politician, Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Her colourful bon vivant father, Thomas Sheridan, managed the family business at the Drury Lane Theatre but died young. Her mother was Caroline Callander, a famous beauty who also wrote novels. The Sheridans’ three daughters, born in rapid succession between 1807-09, were also celebrated beauties, often referred to as “The Three Graces”. Caroline, however, was noted as much for an irreverent tongue and brilliant wit as for her exotic looks and tragic life that led Daniel Maclise to make her the face of Justice in the House of Lords’ fresco.
Norton was able to support her husband with her substantial earnings, writing and editing. She was also able to gain him political favour by dazzling many powerful men, including Prime Minister Lord Melbourne, in her salon. This husband, the besotted but increasingly insecure and abusive George Chapelle Norton, was arguably the most formative influence in her career since her marriage at nineteen. Without him, Caroline Norton would not have been as fiery a social reformer. George Norton’s jealousy led him to kick his pregnant wife in the stomach, lock her out of her home and deny access to her adored children. He also sued Melbourne for criminal conversation (adultery) with Caroline in one of the most infamous of nineteenth-century court cases. Although Melbourne was honourably acquitted, Caroline lost her reputation and became a byword for scandal. Since married women were their husbands’ property in the eyes of the law, she had no claim to either her earnings or her children. Always considered “masculine” for her interest in politics, the incensed, thwarted mother now turned to her pen to seek justice for all married Englishwomen. Her tireless and extremely vocal petitioning led to three pieces of landmark legislation: the Custody of Infants Act of 1839, the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857, and the Married Women’s Property Act of 1870.
Fraser’s telling of this unusual woman’s story is meticulously researched, gossipy and entertaining. However, sudden shifts in temporal gear and tonal jerks lead to a strangely disorienting reading experience. This is possibly due to the biographer’s ambivalence — seemingly poised between admiration and disapproval — towards her heroine. Fraser has always championed history’s bad girls, but this telling seems to lack the warmth of regard that is present, say, in her treatment of Marie Antoinette. While she is anxious to prove that Norton did not actually have sex with Melbourne and that Caroline’s rambunctiousness is best ascribed to a self-confessed hereditary Irish lawlessness (“Forgive my jesting… but Irish blood will dance”), Fraser must also justify her heroine’s oft-repeated belief in the natural inferiority of the female sex. Norton seems to discomfit Fraser by being at once too radical and not radical enough.
While this dilemma haunts many a chronicler writing heroines of the past back into popular discourse, in this case the tension derives principally from the fact that Fraser takes Norton wholly at face value. She reads every genre Norton attempted as simple report and archival record, summarising plots and arguments with painful literalness. She notes Norton’s many reckless acts, like kicking Melbourne’s hat at a French embassy party (Chapter Three is even named for this incident) but seems to be completely taken in by Norton’s apparently conservative literary style. Other readers, most recently the editors of The Selected Letters (2021), Marie MulveyRoberts and Ross Nelson, have been struck by Norton’s cunning with language, the “wily complexities” of her writing, and the way in which she could “represent a sequence of masks to manipulate her recipient”. Norton herself admitted as much in an 1838 letter to Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: “As to petitioning, no one dislikes begging more than I do, especially when one begs for what seems mere justice; but I have long observed that though people will resist claims (however just) they like to do favours.” It is a pity that in doing her the favour of a biography, Dame Fraser turns deaf to the other meanings reverberating within Norton’s strident claims.
