Caroline Elizabeth Sarah Norton, Lady Stirling-Maxwell (22 March 1808 – 15 June 1877) was an active English social reformer and author. She left her husband in 1836, who sued her close friend Lord Melbourne, then the Whig Prime Minister, for criminal conversation (adultery). The jury threw out the claim, but she failed to gain a divorce and was denied access to her three sons. Norton's campaigning led to the passage of the Custody of Infants Act 1839, the Matrimonial Causes Act 1857 and the Married Women's Property Act 1870. She modelled for the fresco of Justice in the House of Lords by Daniel Maclise, who chose her as a famous victim of injustice. Youth and marriage Caroline Norton was born in London to Thomas Sheridan and the novelist Caroline Henrietta Callander. Her father was an actor, soldier and colonial administrator, the son of the prominent Irish playwright and Whig statesman Richard Brinsley Sheridan and his wife Elizabeth Ann Linley. Caroline's Scottish mother was the daughter of a landed gentleman, Col. Sir James Callander of Craigforth and Lady Elizabeth MacDonnell, sister of an Irish peer, the 1st Marquess of Antrim. Mrs. Sheridan authored three short novels described by one of her daughter's biographers as "rather stiff with the style of the eighteenth century, but none without a certain charm and wit...." In 1817, her father died in South Africa while serving as colonial secretary at the Cape of Good Hope. His family was left almost penniless. Prince Frederick, Duke of York and Albany, an old friend of her grandfather's, arranged for them to live at Hampton Court Palace in a "grace and favour" apartment for several years. The combined beauty and accomplishments of the Sheridan sisters led to their being collectively referred to as the Three "Graces". The eldest, Helen, was a songwriter who married Price Blackwood, the 4th Baron Dufferin and Claneboye. Through her, Caroline became the aunt of Frederick Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, 1st Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, later the third Governor General of Canada and eighth Viceroy of India. Her younger sister, Georgiana, seen as the prettiest, later married Edward Seymour, 12th Duke of Somerset. In 1827, she married George Chapple Norton, barrister, Member of Parliament for Guildford, and the younger brother of Lord Grantley. George was a jealous and possessive husband given to violent fits of drunkenness. The union quickly proved unhappy due to his mental and physical abuse.