ABSTRACT
'Charlotte Elizabeth' was the pseudonym of Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, Evangelical social-problem novelist. Born in Norwich in 1790, the daughter of a clergyman, Michael Browne, who was a minor canon of Norwich Cathedral, she married Captain George Phelan (d. 1837) in 1813, but separated from him around 1824. Lewis Tonna, whom she married in 1841, was also a writer of religious works. Best known for her novels Helen Fleetwood (1841), written in support of the Ten Hours Movement in factories, and The Wrongs of Women (1843—44), Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna also edited a succession of religious journals, and published her Personal Recollections (1841) in the form of letters to an imaginary friend, illustrating the mental and spiritual discipline she had undergone. Mrs Tonna died in 1846. She regarded her mission as 'the cause of Protestantism', as she declares at the start of her autobiography, and felt it was significant that she was born 'just opposite the dark old gateway of that strong building [in Norwich] where the glorious martyrs of Mary's day were imprisoned'.
