Description
Caroline Norton, born in 1808, was a society beauty, poet and pamphleteer. Her good looks and wit attracted many male admirers, first her husband, the Honourable George Norton, and then the Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne.
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Caroline Norton, born in 1808, was a society beauty, wit, poet, pamphleteer and blue stocking. Married to a boorish minor aristocrat at 19, who accused her, for his own political ends, of an affair, 'Criminal Conversation', with Lord Melbourne which ended in the 'Trial of the Century'. Pilloried by society, cut off and bankrupted by her family, she went on to be the most important figure in establishing womens' rights in marriage. The Criminal Conversation of Mrs Norton is the extraordinary story of one woman's fight for the rights of women everywhere. For the next thirty years Caroline campaigned for women and battled male-dominated Victorian society, helping to write the Infant Custody Act (1839), and influenced the Matrimonial Causes (Divorce) Act (1857) and the Married Women's Property Act (1870), which gave women a separate legal identity for the first time.
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