Diana of the Crossways

When George Meredith published Diana of the Crossways in 1855 he had a huge hit on his hands, partly because he chose a notorious woman for his heroine - novelist, poet, and essayist Caroline Norton (1808-77), granddaughter of Irish playwright Richard Brimsley Sheridan. At nineteen she married an awful man, George Norton, who beat her, but she gave birth to three sons during this unfortunate alliance. Seemingly with the approval of her husband, beautiful and witty Caroline, a major flirt, then took up with influential politician Lord Melbourne. (Melbourne, soon to be Prime Minister, liked literary women; he had been married to Lady Caroline Lamb, the Lord Byron intimate who famously deemed the poet "mad, bad, and dangerous to know.") But Caroline's husband sued Melbourne for "criminal conversation" in 1836 - and lost - and Dickens fictionalized the very public trial in The Pickwick Papers. Caroline left Norton, and published several influencial pamphlets after discovering women were not permitted to file for divorce or seek custody of their children. A second scandal cemented Caroline's reputation as a bad girl. While involved with Secretary of War Sidney Herbert, she was suspected of tipping off The Times (perhaps for money) that the 1846 Corn Laws were about to be repealed. Herbert stopped seeing her, and she kept a somewhat lower profile after that. George Meredith has met Caroline a few times, and freely admitted to stealing the details of her life to create the immensely likable Diana. (He says he made her smarter, though.) After the novel's success dredged up colorful stories once more, Caroline's family forced him to add a disclaimer: "The story of Diana of the Crossways is to be read as fiction." But while several biographies of Caroline Norton exist, it is only in Meredith's novel that this early feminist hero comes fully alive. --- from book's back cover