Queer Places:
Kentwell Hall, Long Melford, Sudbury CO10 9BA, UK
University of Cambridge, 4 Mill Ln, Cambridge CB2 1RZ
Columbia University (Ivy League), 116th St and Broadway, New York, NY 10027
Jane Elizabeth "Lucy" Norton (25 October 1893 - 24 November 1962) was an English librarian and bibliographer, bibliographer of Edward Gibbon and editor of his correspondence.[1] She had a close relationship with Sophie Fedorovitch. Edward Burra visited Paris with Lucy Norton and Sophie Fedorovitch and Sophie painted a picture of him, now lost.
Jane Norton was the daughter of Henry Turton Norton, a wealthy solicitor who lived at Kentwell Hall in Long Melford.[1][2] An older brother was H. T. J. (Harry) Norton, a mathematical population geneticist at Trinity College, Cambridge (the Henry Tertius James Norton, "H.T.J.N.", to whom Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey is dedicated).[3] Before James Strachey died he gave to Lucy Norton her brother Harry Norton's letters to himself and Lytton Strachey. Leonard Woolf advised her against publishing them. "My main reason is that they are so much about intimate psychological small beer that except for the interest in buggery I cannot imagine their being of interest to or even understandable by the general reader." He found them hard to read himself, even though he knew everyone involved intimately. They were all dominated by the "semi-real, semi-unreal personal drama which at that time largely owing to Lytton was imposed upon Cambridge personal relations."
Lucy Norton was educated at Francis Holland School before studying History and Economics at Newnham College, Cambridge and studying Social Sciences at Columbia University.[1] In 1926 she became honorary librarian to the Women’s Service Library, later maintained by the Fawcett Society, cataloguing the feminist collection there.[1] In 1929 Norton became a director of the London antiquarian booksellers Birrell and Garnett. There she corresponded with Andre Gide, helping him to find books of interest in English.[4] She also collected material for her bio-bibliography of Gibbon, which appeared in 1940. During the war she helped organize books for prisoners of war, and after the war she compiled a Guide to National and Provincial Directories for the Royal Historical Society. However her main activity was preparing her edition of Gibbon’s letters, which appeared in 1956 and won her the British Academy’s Rose Mary Crawshay Prize in 1957.[1] In 1959 she was appointed general editor of the catalogue of the Pepys Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge, though she died before the project could be completed. She was elected a Fellow of Newnham College in 1960.[1]
My published books:
