Yet her respect for natural landscape and love of the countryside round her home, though very different in its feeling from Wordsworth’s, gave her poetry much more in common with his than with the verse of many of her own female contemporaries, such as Letitia Landon. Romantic love and its tribulations was never her subject, once she left Ellen Fitzarthur behind. Partly on this account, perhaps, Felicia Hemans, herself an admirer of Wordsworth and a champion of the ‘domestic affections’, was the woman poet she most revered.6 Even Hemans, however, never tried her hand at verse autobiography in the way that Bowles (or Wordsworth) did. And it was commonly believed that women should, like Dorothy Wordsworth, be satisfied with reading what men write, rather than aspire to publication themselves. Given the heavy cultural constraints both spoken and unspoken, on women giving voice to themselves, it is extraordinary to think that Caroline Bowles had the temerity not only to write her verse autobiography but to publish it. Furthermore, the evidence we have suggests that Wordsworth knew of it too. It was read ‘with very much pleasure’ in the Wordsworth household in September 1836, soon after is first publication.7 We can be moderately certain that Bowles would have heard of Wordsworth’s autobiographical project either from himself in 1823 or from Southey, who was of course part of the circle in which its compo­ sition was an open secret. However, it is equally certain that she did not know of it when she began writing her own poem well before 1818, when she and Robert Southey began their friendship by correspond­ ence. By 1835, when John Wilson wrote an extensive adulatory essay on Wordsworth for Blackwood’s, his reputation had shot to such a high point that if his, far grander, verse autobiography had already been published, Bowles might well have shrunk from publishing her own. In any event, she took the bull by the horns, and in the summer of 1836, she published it. How was it received? With a good deal of serious attention, much of it favourable. It was not Wordsworth with whom she was compared, but Thomson and Cowper. Yet the Spectator’s unsigned review (1836), voi. 9, pp. 707-8, immediately recognized that ‘The subject of the Birth-day is an intellectual autobiography, the retrospect of a mind’s life’.

DOI link for Yet her respect for natural landscape and love of the countryside round her home, though very different in its feeling from Wordsworth’s, gave her poetry much more in common with his than with the verse of many of her own female contemporaries, such as Letitia Landon. Romantic love and its tribulations was never her subject, once she left Ellen Fitzarthur behind. Partly on this account, perhaps, Felicia Hemans, herself an admirer of Wordsworth and a champion of the ‘domestic affections’, was the woman poet she most revered.6 Even Hemans, however, never tried her hand at verse autobiography in the way that Bowles (or Wordsworth) did. And it was commonly believed that women should, like Dorothy Wordsworth, be satisfied with reading what men write, rather than aspire to publication themselves. Given the heavy cultural constraints both spoken and unspoken, on women giving voice to themselves, it is extraordinary to think that Caroline Bowles had the temerity not only to write her verse autobiography but to publish it. Furthermore, the evidence we have suggests that Wordsworth knew of it too. It was read ‘with very much pleasure’ in the Wordsworth household in September 1836, soon after is first publication.7 We can be moderately certain that Bowles would have heard of Wordsworth’s autobiographical project either from himself in 1823 or from Southey, who was of course part of the circle in which its compo­ sition was an open secret. However, it is equally certain that she did not know of it when she began writing her own poem well before 1818, when she and Robert Southey began their friendship by correspond­ ence. By 1835, when John Wilson wrote an extensive adulatory essay on Wordsworth for Blackwood’s, his reputation had shot to such a high point that if his, far grander, verse autobiography had already been published, Bowles might well have shrunk from publishing her own. In any event, she took the bull by the horns, and in the summer of 1836, she published it. How was it received? With a good deal of serious attention, much of it favourable. It was not Wordsworth with whom she was compared, but Thomson and Cowper. Yet the Spectator’s unsigned review (1836), voi. 9, pp. 707-8, immediately recognized that ‘The subject of the Birth-day is an intellectual autobiography, the retrospect of a mind’s life’.

Yet her respect for natural landscape and love of the countryside round her home, though very different in its feeling from Wordsworth’s, gave her poetry much more in common with his than with the verse of many of her own female contemporaries, such as Letitia Landon. Romantic love and its tribulations was never her subject, once she left Ellen Fitzarthur behind. Partly on this account, perhaps, Felicia Hemans, herself an admirer of Wordsworth and a champion of the ‘domestic affections’, was the woman poet she most revered.6 Even Hemans, however, never tried her hand at verse autobiography in the way that Bowles (or Wordsworth) did. And it was commonly believed that women should, like Dorothy Wordsworth, be satisfied with reading what men write, rather than aspire to publication themselves. Given the heavy cultural constraints both spoken and unspoken, on women giving voice to themselves, it is extraordinary to think that Caroline Bowles had the temerity not only to write her verse autobiography but to publish it. Furthermore, the evidence we have suggests that Wordsworth knew of it too. It was read ‘with very much pleasure’ in the Wordsworth household in September 1836, soon after is first publication.7 We can be moderately certain that Bowles would have heard of Wordsworth’s autobiographical project either from himself in 1823 or from Southey, who was of course part of the circle in which its compo­ sition was an open secret. However, it is equally certain that she did not know of it when she began writing her own poem well before 1818, when she and Robert Southey began their friendship by correspond­ ence. By 1835, when John Wilson wrote an extensive adulatory essay on Wordsworth for Blackwood’s, his reputation had shot to such a high point that if his, far grander, verse autobiography had already been published, Bowles might well have shrunk from publishing her own. In any event, she took the bull by the horns, and in the summer of 1836, she published it. How was it received? With a good deal of serious attention, much of it favourable. It was not Wordsworth with whom she was compared, but Thomson and Cowper. Yet the Spectator’s unsigned review (1836), voi. 9, pp. 707-8, immediately recognized that ‘The subject of the Birth-day is an intellectual autobiography, the retrospect of a mind’s life’.