Caroline Anne Southey (1786–1854)

Caroline Anne Southey, née Bowles, was born at Buckland Manor, near Lymington in Hampshire, England, the only child of Charles Bowles, a retired naval officer of the East India Company, and his wife Anne Burrard. In childhood, she spent summers at Calshot Castle on the seacoast, the residence of her military uncle, Sir Harry Burrard. She was tutored privately by William Gilpin, the local clergyman, who was a writer and artist. She contracted smallpox, which affected her appearance and made her reclusive. After the death of her parents, she turned to writing to support herself. She wrote a poem entitled "Ellen Fitz Arthur" in about 1817 and sent it to Robert Southey, the Poet Laureate of England, for his advice. It was eventually published anonymously in 1820 as Ellen Fitzarthur: a Poem in Five Cantos and went to a second edition in 1822. Much of her work was originally published in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. She was a versatile writer who produced prose fiction in Chapters on Churchyards (1829), satire in The Cat's Tail (1831), dramatic monologue in Tales of the Factories (1833), as well as poetry, including The Widow’s Tale, and Other Poems (1822), and The Birthday, and Other Poems (1836). In 1826, she published a miscellany of mixed prose and verse, Solitary Hours. She first actually met Southey in 1820, and they agree to jointly write an epic poem about Robin Hood, a project that produced only a small piece published after his death as Robin Hood: A Fragment (1847). She married Southey in 1839, at age 52, after the death of his first wife. He died in 1843, and Caroline had to leave his house, Greta Hall in Keswick, immediately. She moved back to her childhood home, and was awarded a civil list pension in 1852.