Among women poets who achieved a comparable degree of recognition and success in the 1820s and 1830s none was so isolated as Caroline Bowles, before she formed the friendship with Southey. Without its sustaining influence, she might never have gone on to achieve what she did. We have to recognise the sheer impossibility of nourishing a crea­ tive talent in an environment without any medium of access to the commercially driven world of print. Southey provided that medium: he believed in her as ‘a women of genius’, and that belief nourished her creative spring. Notes

DOI link for Among women poets who achieved a comparable degree of recognition and success in the 1820s and 1830s none was so isolated as Caroline Bowles, before she formed the friendship with Southey. Without its sustaining influence, she might never have gone on to achieve what she did. We have to recognise the sheer impossibility of nourishing a crea­ tive talent in an environment without any medium of access to the commercially driven world of print. Southey provided that medium: he believed in her as ‘a women of genius’, and that belief nourished her creative spring. Notes

Among women poets who achieved a comparable degree of recognition and success in the 1820s and 1830s none was so isolated as Caroline Bowles, before she formed the friendship with Southey. Without its sustaining influence, she might never have gone on to achieve what she did. We have to recognise the sheer impossibility of nourishing a crea­ tive talent in an environment without any medium of access to the commercially driven world of print. Southey provided that medium: he believed in her as ‘a women of genius’, and that belief nourished her creative spring. Notes