Caroline Anne Bowles grew up as a sheltered only child in idyllic Buckland, England. William Gilpin, the oft-cited father of the picturesque, was the local parson at the time who taught her elementary reading and writing skills, and encouraged her to draw. Her mother's death in 1816 left Caroline alone and financially destitute. Fortunately, her father's adopted son, Colonel Bruce, insisted that she accept an annuity, which allowed her to keep the family home. Bowles was an experimental and dexterous writer whose publications represent a range of forms: prose fiction (Chapters on Churchyards), verse satire (The Cat's Tail), dramatic monologue (Tales of the Factories), and blank verse autobiography (The Birth-day). In her lifetime she published five books of verse, two books of prose tales and one miscellany of mixed prose and verse.

Driven by financial need in 1818, she contacted the Poet Laureate, Robert Southey. Southey was well-known for his willingness to help women and working-class poets, so it was not unusual for young writers to ask for his literary advice. In response to her Ellen Fitzarthur: A Metrical Tale, Southey replied, "You have the eye, the ear, and the heart of a poetess . . ." (Dowden 10). And so began a twenty-two year friendship and correspondence.

When they first met in 1820, Southey suggested that they form a secret, intellectual union to collaborate on a lengthy Robin Hood poem. Southey describes this project in quasi-marital terms, oddly anticipating their actual marriage almost twenty years later: "The secret itself would be delightful while we thought proper to keep it; still more so the spiritual union which death would not part . . . As

Caroline Anne Bowles grew up as a sheltered only child in idyllic Buckland, England. William Gilpin, the oft-cited father of the picturesque, was the local parson at the time who taught her elementary reading and writing skills, and encouraged her to draw. Her mother's death in 1816 left Caroline alone and financially destitute. Fortunately, her father's adopted son, Colonel Bruce, insisted that she accept an annuity, which allowed her to keep the family home. Bowles was an experimental and dexterous writer whose publications represent a range of forms: prose fiction (Chapters on Churchyards), verse satire (The Cat's Tail), dramatic monologue (Tales of the Factories), and blank verse autobiography (The Birth-day). In her lifetime she published five books of verse, two books of prose tales and one miscellany of mixed prose and verse.

Driven by financial need in 1818, she contacted the Poet Laureate, Robert Southey. Southey was well-known for his willingness to help women and working-class poets, so it was not unusual for young writers to ask for his literary advice. In response to her Ellen Fitzarthur: A Metrical Tale, Southey replied, "You have the eye, the ear, and the heart of a poetess . . ." (Dowden 10). And so began a twenty-two year friendship and correspondence.

When they first met in 1820, Southey suggested that they form a secret, intellectual union to collaborate on a lengthy Robin Hood poem. Southey describes this project in quasi-marital terms, oddly anticipating their actual marriage almost twenty years later: "The secret itself would be delightful while we thought proper to keep it; still more so the spiritual union which death would not part . . . As there can be no just cause or impediment why these two persons should not be thus joined together, tell me that you consent to this union, and I will send you the rude outline of the story and of the characters" (Storey 300). The poem was never finished for various reasons. At the time, Southey was married to Edith Fricker, whose sister Sarah married Samuel Taylor Coleridge. After Coleridge left his wife, Southey was supporting two families, which was a huge financial responsibility and burden. For Bowles the poem's rhyme scheme, based on Southey's Arabian epic Thalaba the Destroyer, was too cumbersome: "I have been at work trying that metre of `Thalaba,' a fine work I make of it! It is to me just like attempting to drive a tilbury in a tram-road. I keep quartering, or trying to quarter, for a yard or so, and then down goes the wheel into the old groove. I cannot keep out of blank verse" (Dowden 48). Although Robin Hood remained an incomplete project, it signified a deep intellectual friendship between Southey and Bowles.

In 1834 Edith Fricker Southey's mental health deteriorated to such an extent that she had to be committed to an asylum. She returned home three years later and soon after died. Two years after his wife's death, Southey married Bowles. At first Bowles protested the engagement because she feared his full-grown children's response to a second marriage, a fear that was perceptive in retrospect. Three months after their marriage Southey became completely senile, rendering him unable to read, write or talk. Bowles and Kate, his daughter, fought over visitation, creating a great deal of tension and resentment. Finally in 1843 Southey died and Bowles had to deal with a new set of disagreements with his son, Cuthbert, about who would have the right to edit his posthumous work. Cuthbert gained the right to publish Southey's work, leaving Bowles with only the right to publish their collaborative work, Robin Hood: A Fragment (1847). The poem is divided into two parts, and each is authored separately. Their contributions differ in interesting ways: Southey's section reads like a historical romance, whereas her section focuses primarily on natural description. Bowles remarked modestly to one of her friends: "I will not leave you to learn from a publick advertisement that I am about to publish a little Volume of poetry of which the chief value will be comprised in very small compass -- my Husband's portion of a fragment of Robin Hood -- our joint work -- so fondly planned" (quoted from Blain 215).