Caroline Anne Southey

Caroline Anne Southey (1786–1854), was an English poet and second wife of Robert Southey.

Born Caroline Anne Bowles on 6 December 1786 at Buckland Manor, near Lymington, she was the only child of Captain Charles Bowles (1737–1801), retired from the East India Company, and Anne Burrard (1753–1817), a prominent local family. Her melancholic father moved the family to the much smaller Buckland Cottage when she was small, but she spent her summers by the sea at Calshot Castle, home of a military uncle, Sir Harry Burrard.

Her private education was mainly at the hands of the writer and artist William Gilpin (1724–1804), vicar of nearby Boldre, known for his introduction of the idea of the post-Enlightenment picturesque. She showed early artistic talent. Some of her surviving paintings are owned by Keswick School and held by the Wordsworth Trust.

Mismanagement by a guardian left Bowles in financial straits after her mother's death in 1817. These were alleviated partly by an annuity of £150 from an adopted son of her father, Colonel Bruce, but spurred her to seek to publish a "metrical verse tale" she had written. She wrote for advice first to the poet laureate, Robert Southey, her future husband, but his publisher, John Murray was discouraging, then to the poet and editor James Montgomery. The work was published by Longman in 1820 as Ellen Fitzarthur: a Poem in Five Cantos and reached a second edition in 1822. Much of her work was published initially in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine after she struck up a lively correspondence with William Blackwood.

Bowles's first meeting with Southey in 1820 led to a proposal that they jointly write an epic poem about Robin Hood, although this only yielded Robin Hood: A Fragment after Southey's death. From the outset she could not work in the curious metre Southey chose: "I have been at work trying that metre of [Southey's poem] 'Thalaba', a fine work I make of it! It is to me just like attempting to drive a tilbury in a tram-road," she wrote to him.

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