Rosina Bulwer-Lytton

Early life

Born Rosina Doyle Wheeler on 4 November 1802, she was the daughter of women's rights advocate Anna Wheeler and Anglo-Irish landowner Francis Massey Wheeler. Her maternal grandfather was the Rev. Nicholas Milley Doyle, a Church of Ireland clergyman, and her uncle Sir John Milley Doyle led British and Portuguese forces in the Peninsular War and the War of the Two Brothers. Her education came partly from Frances Arabella Rowden, a poet who, according to Mary Mitford, 'had a knack of making poetesses of her pupils.' That circle included Caroline Ponsonby (later Lady Caroline Lamb), poet Letitia Elizabeth Landon, travel writer Emma Roberts, and Anna Maria Fielding (who published as Mrs. S. C. Hall).

Marriage

She married Edward Bulwer-Lytton on 29 August 1827, against his mother's wishes, which led to his allowance being cut off and forced him to work. His writing, political career, and infidelity damaged the marriage, and the couple legally separated in 1836, after which her children were taken from her. In 1839 she published Cheveley, or the Man of Honour, a novel that caricatured her husband. In June 1858, while he stood as a parliamentary candidate for Hertfordshire, she appeared at the hustings and indignantly denounced him—a scene her son Robert later commemorated in sarcastic verse.

She was then placed under restraint as insane and detained in an establishment in Brentford, but liberated a few weeks later following a public outcry. She wrote about the experience in A Blighted Life (1880); though published after her husband's death, the book caused a rift with her son, and she tried to disassociate herself from it.

Death

Lady Lytton died in Upper Sydenham. While her husband was buried in Westminster Abbey, she was laid to rest in an unmarked grave.

Children

She had two children with Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Emily Elizabeth Bulwer-Lytton was born 17 June 1828 and died 29 April 1848 in mysterious circumstances. (Edward) Robert Lytton Bulwer-Lytton was born 8 November 1831 and died 24 November 1891; he served as Viceroy of British India from 1876 to 1880.

Works

Her published works include Cheveley: or, The Man of Honour (1839, two volumes), The Budget of the Bubble Family (1840), The Prince-Duke and the Page: An Historical Novel (1843), Bianca Cappello: An Historical Romance (1843), Memoirs of a Muscovite (1844), The Peer's Daughters: A Novel (1849), Miriam Sedley, or the Tares and the Wheat: A Tale of Real Life (1850), The School for Husbands: or Moliére's Life and Times (1852), Behind the Scenes, A Novel (1854), The World and His Wife, or a Person of Consequence, a Photographic Novel (1858), Very Successful (1859), The Household Fairy (1870), Where there's a Will there's a Way (1871), Chumber Chase (1871), Shells from the Sands of Time (1876), A Blighted Life (1880), and Refutation of an Audacious Forgery of the Dowager Lady's name to a book of the Publication of which she was totally Ignorant (1880).