The Criminal Conversation of Mrs Norton is the extraordinary story of one woman’s fight for the rights of women after she was publically accused, by her husband, of adultery with the Prime Minister. The accusation sparked ‘the scandal of the century’, and despite her acquittal, Mrs Norton was ruined. For the next thirty years she campaigned for women and battled male-dominated Victorian society, helping to write the Infant Custody Act (1839), and influenced the Matrimonial Causes (Divorce) Act (1857) and the Married Women’s Property Act (1870). Di Atkinson tells the story of one of the first great feminists.