Marriage of misery

FERN RIDDELL recommends a vivid biography of a women’s rights campaigner who shook off the shackles of married life

- FERN RIDDELL

“She does not exist: her husband exists…” This is how Antonia Fraser opens her new epoch on the life of Caroline Norton, one of the most important female writers of the early Victorian era. Norton wrote these words in her 1854 pamphlet English Laws for Women in the Nineteenth Century. It came nearly 20 years after she had left her abusive husband, George, a move that saw her children removed from her, while she remained in the thrall of a man who continued to receive all of her earnings as an author. Her life and writings are vividly realised in Fraser’s new analysis of the woman and her words, straddling both the Regency and Victorian eras in the fight for women’s rights as wives, mothers and workers.