Caroline Frances Cornwallis

Caroline Frances Cornwallis (1786 – 8 January 1858) was an English feminist writer. Her father, William Cornwallis, belonged to the junior branch of the better known military and naval family. The daughter of a Kent rector who had been an Oxford fellow, Caroline read voraciously on both religious and secular matters throughout her childhood. Later, she travelled widely for her times, to Italy and to Malta. She mastered Greek, Latin and Hebrew, and also among modern languages, Italian, German and French. She also worked on Icelandic and other Scandinavian languages.

When it came to her turn to take up the pen, she built herself a role as a discreet, usually anonymous, voice for the underprivileged and under-educated. If the widest group she championed in this way were the poor in Victorian England, she also spoke out for the rights of women. She was wedded to her faith, a moderate Anglicanism that rejected as excessive the attitudes of Edward Bouverie Pusey and the Oxford Movement: she wrote "We have abundance of technical terms but have we the spirit of the Gospel?"

She was born in 1786 and spent her childhood living at the rectory of St John the Baptist Church in Wittersham, Kent, where her father was rector from 1778. Her mother, Mary Cornwallis, published Observations, Critical, Explanatory and Practical on the Canonical Scriptures, in 1817. Caroline had an elder sister, Sarah, born in 1779, who died a month after the birth of her son in 1803; the much-loved grandchild and nephew born on that occasion, James, died twelve years later. The double tragedy marked the family, including Caroline herself, deeply.

In 1806, Caroline turned down an offer of marriage from Jean Charles Léonard de Sismondi, a Swiss refugee of Italian origin who had spent some time living as a refugee from revolutionary turmoil, in the home of a neighbouring parish vicar, just a few miles from Wittersham. Despite her refusal of his offer of marriage, Caroline remained a close friend of Sismondi and from 1826 to 1828 she spent time as a tenant of his family home, in Pescia Italy. She returned home when news of her father's death reached her. In 1835 she made one further journey abroad, visiting another family friend, the diplomat John Hookham Frere in Malta. With the death of two friends in Italy, Sismondi's nephew Giulio Forti in 1838 and Sismondi himself four years later, she seems to have decided to stop travelling abroad, although she had been contemplating a return to Italy in 1836.

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