ABSTRACT
The Birth-Day, published in 1836, was, in many ways, the crowning achievement of Caroline Bowles’s career. In reclaiming the directionless profusion and excess of her own childhood, she challenges the directedness of the ‘improving age’ in which she writes. The Birth-Day, an extensive collection of her reminiscences about her childhood, written across three books in blank verse, has proved difficult to even its most sympathetic and enthusiastic readers. Although her first two volumes of poetry, Ellen Fitzarthur and The Widow’s Tale, had been deeply inspired by her own, personal ‘dark hours’, they did, nevertheless, read very conventionally. She reaches a similar conclusion in ‘Beauty’, in which she maintains that ‘pretty women are the happiest, as well as the most agreeable, of the species’. In 1836, however, seventeen years after its original conception, Bowles revived her plans for her autobiographical blank-verse poem, The Birth-Day.
