Caroline Norton is primarily remembered for the notorious scandal surrounding the breakup of her marriage, for her influence on British divorce and custody legislation, and for her novels. Virtually all modern critical work on her writing focuses on her fiction and nonfiction prose. Her first and deepest literary interest, however, was poetry, and it was through her verse that she attained her greatest contemporary esteem.

In an essay in the June-September 1840 issue of Quarterly Review Henry N. Coleridge ranks Norton at the top of a list of female poets including Elizabeth Barrett and calls her "the Byron of [our] modern poetesses." Coleridge had in mind the Byron of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812-1818) and the tales rather than the Byron of Don Juan (1819-1824), but some of his contemporaries took exception to the comparison regardless. In many ways, though, it is a good one. Like Byron's poetry, Norton's contains...