Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Robert Southey
-
Standard Name: Southey, Robert
Robert Southey was a Romantic poet, one of the Lake Poets with Wordsworth
and Coleridge
. In addition to epics, ballads, and other verse, he penned several plays and contributed regularly to the ToryQuarterly Review. His prose works, for which he was celebrated during his lifetime, were primarily historical, ecclesiastical,and biographical, in addition to travel writing. He also produced translations (from French and Spanish), editions, and anthologies. He enjoyed an excellent reputation in his day, and for his last thirty years of life served as Poet Laureate.
A Christian and political radical, STC
associated with William Godwin
and Robert Southey
. William Wordsworth
wrote of him on 21 March 1796, I saw but little of him. I wished indeed to have seen...
Friends, Associates
Mary Hays
After Wollstonecraft's death, and Fenwick's departure from England, it seems unlikely that MH
found female friends to replace them, though she knew well such people as Elizabeth Inchbald
, Anna Letitia Barbauld
, and Charles
Friends, Associates
Hannah More
Many of her later friends were at least a generation younger than she was. She met many members of the Clapham Sect
in the 1790s, of whom Henry Thornton
and his daughter Marianne
became particularly...
Friends, Associates
Anna Eliza Bray
Two days later, AEB
briefly met Robert Southey
for the first time in person in London. They had been corresponding for some years after he received a review copy of her novel The Protestant.
Mudge, Bradford Keyes, editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 116. Gale Research.
116: 52
Bray, Anna Eliza. Autobiography of Anna Eliza Bray. Editor Kempe, John A., Chapman and Hall.
292-3
Friends, Associates
Anna Eliza Bray
Four years later, when Southey
's health was in decline, his recently-married second wife, the poet Caroline Bowles
, struck up a correspondence with AEB
. This relationship by letter lasted for fourteen years, although...
Friends, Associates
Charlotte Smith
She also at this period met and impressed Robert Southey
.
Fletcher, Loraine. Charlotte Smith: A Critical Biography. Macmillan.
289
Friends, Associates
Mary Maria Colling
It was, said Bray, four or five years after their first meeting before Colling took the decisive action of revealing some of her poems. Bray made contact for her with Caroline Bowles
as well as...
Friends, Associates
Germaine de Staël
In Regency England GS
met Coleridge
, Southey
, and Byron
. Jane Austen
, however, made a point of avoiding her.
Winegarten, Renee. Mme de Staël. Berg.
74, 76
Friends, Associates
Margaret Holford
Holford seems to have cared about making influential friends, and succeeded in doing so although she lived in the provinces. She established a correspondence with Sir Walter Scott
, and although their relationship got off...
MMB
had some kind of general breakdown of health whose beginning Ernest Betham dates to about 1818 (though she seems to have been well when her Vignettes: in Verse appeared this year). Robert Southey
reported...
Health
Mary Maria Colling
Anna Eliza Bray
later wrote that her friend had a nervous temperament.
Bray, Anna Eliza, and Mary Maria Colling. “Letters to Robert Southey”. Fables and Other Pieces in Verse by M.M. Colling, Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, pp. 1-85.
8
In a letter to Robert Southey
, Bray reported that Colling admitted to being assailed by envy and malice, on account...
Instructor
Sara Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge ensured that his sons received formal schooling, but neglected Sara. Remaining at Greta Hall in her father's absence, she was pushed by her mother early on to study regularly and rigorously.
Mudge, Bradford Keyes, and Sara Coleridge. Sara Coleridge, a Victorian Daughter: Her Life and Essays. Yale University Press.
