In its neglect of both her personal and artistic virtues, literary history has not been kind to Caroline Anne Bowles. Literary historians may recognize her only through the disapproving eyes of the Wordsworth circle, as Robert Southey's calculating wife during his senility and as "wicked stepmother" to his children. Caroline Southey's entire life and career cannot be judged, however, by the gossip of one group about her four-year marriage with the poet laureate. At the time of her wedding to Southey, her friend of twenty years, she was at the height of her popularity as a poet and storyteller. Although she was never as celebrated as Felicia Hemans or Mary Russell Mitford, her poems and tales have much in common with theirs in tone and subject, and British readers of the 1820s and 1830s relished the pathos and piquancy of Caroline Bowles's writings.

Caroline Anne Bowles was born...