These letters are an indispensable resource for anyone interested in the extraordinary life of Caroline Norton, novelist, poet, and campaigner for married women and mothers rights.
Selected from over 80 archives and 2000 letters, they contain rare insights into her close relationships, including her intimate friendship with Lord Melbourne and friendships with other well-known writers such as Mary Shelley, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Robert Browning, Sheridan Le Fanu, Edward Trelawny, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Benjamin Disraeli, Frances Trollope, William Longfellow, Lucie Duff Gordon, William Barnes, Catherine Gore, Alexander Kinglake and Henry Taylor.
Other celebrated Victorian figures who feature in the correspondence include Charles Babbage, William Gladstone, Mary Ann Disraeli, Lord and Lady Palmerston, Sir Robert Peel, Lord John Russell, Edwin Landseer, Charles Macready, Amelia B. Edwards, Sidney Herbert, Leigh Hunt and Daniel Maclise.
These impeccably annotated and newly transcribed letters gathered from around the world open up a colourful nineteenth-century panorama of politics, literature and society.
Lady Antonia Fraser
