Nicholas Milley Doyle, a Church of Ireland clergyman, Rector of Newcastle,[1][2] while her father was Francis Massey Wheeler, an Anglo-Irish landowner.

[6][better source needed] His writing and efforts in the political arena and infidelity took a toll upon their marriage, and the couple legally separated in 1836.

In June 1858, Edward Bulwer-Lytton was standing in a by-election as a parliamentary candidate for Hertfordshire (prior to his elevation to the peerage).

She appeared at the hustings and indignantly denounced him, a scene that her son, Robert, commemorated in sarcastic verse:Who came to Hertford in a chaise And uttered anything but praise About the author of my days?

The imprisonment of socially inconvenient women, at the behest of their male relatives, had been revealed to the public with the case of Louisa Nottidge and Wilkie Collins's novel based on it, The Woman in White.