SOURCE: "Covered but Not Bound: Caroline Norton and the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act," in Uneven Developments: the Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England, The University of Chicago Press, 1988, pp. 51-88.

In the following excerpt, Poovey examines the issues of gender and power inequality in Norton's political writings.

Upper-middle-class Caroline Sheridan, the beautiful granddaughter of the Whig playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, was married in 1826 to George Norton, a Tory aristocratic younger son whose fortune was supposed to compensate for the fact that the couple barely knew each other when they married. Caroline's mother had been misled about George Norton's finances, however, and the young couple soon found themselves almost completely dependent financially on Caroline's literary earnings and her family's Whig connections. In 1829, Caroline began to publish her poetry, and, in 1830, when George lost his seat in Parliament, she persuaded her old Whig friend Lord Melbourne, then home secretary, to...