Small image of a man handing a book to a women across a counter.

At the Circulating Library

A Database of Victorian Fiction, 1837–1901

A Database of Victorian Fiction, 1837–1901

Author: Hon. Mary Laura Dutton

Author: Hon. Mary Laura Dutton (1836–1859)

Biography: The Hon. Mary Laura Dutton was born in 1836, the daughter of Lord James Henry Legge Dutton (later 3rd Baron Sherborne) and Lady Elizabeth Howard. At the age of seventeen, she wrote Woman's Temptation and she sent the manuscript to Lord William Pitt Lennox to read. He assisted in getting the novel published, but Dutton died in 1859 before that happened. The published novel is "edited" with a preface by her aunt Isabella Dutton, wife of Ralph Heneage Dutton. According to Lennox, "Had her life been spared, Miss Dutton would have been one of the best writers of the day."

References: Burke; Lennox, Celebrities I Have Known (1877)

Fiction Titles:

  1. Woman's Temptation: A Novel.  3 vol.  London: Hurst and Blackett, 1860.