Norton, THE HON. MRS.

Norton, THE HON. MRS. Caroline Sheridan, poet and novelist, was born in 1808, the second of the three beautiful granddaughters of Richard Brinsley Sheridan. One of her sisters became Lady Dufferin, the other Duchess of Somerset; and she herself in 1827 married the Hon. George Chapple Norton (1800-75). She bore him three sons, of whom Thomas Brinsley (1831-77), the second, succeeded to the title of fourth Lord Grantley; but the marriage proved a most unhappy one, and her friendship with Lord Melbourne (q.v.), whom she first met in 1831, led her husband to institute five years afterwards a groundless and unsuccessful action of divorce, the damages laid at £10,000. Already she had made by her pen £1400 in one year, and after the separation from her husband she continued her literary activity. Her poems include The Sorrows of Rosalie (1829), The Undying One (the Wandering Jew, 1830), The Child of the Islands (1845), and The Lady of La Garaye (1862); her novels, Stuart of Dunleath (1847), Lost and Saved (1863), and Old Sir Douglas (1868). In March 1877 she married Sir William Stirling-Maxwell (q.v.), but died on the 15th June following. Her story beyond doubt supplied the subject for Diana of the Crossways, the most charming of George Meredith's novels.