Caroline Anne Southey (née Bowles; 6 December 1786 – 20 July 1854) was an English poet and painter.
Her melancholic father moved the family to the much smaller Buckland Cottage when she was a child, but she spent her summers by the sea at Calshot Castle, home of a military uncle, Sir Harry Burrard.
Her private education was mainly at the hands of the writer and artist William Gilpin (1724–1804), vicar of nearby Boldre, known for his introduction of the idea of the post-Enlightenment picturesque.
[4] Most of the fragment eventually published in 1847 was the work of Caroline Southey, including some fine sonnets on their marriage, which took place only on 4 June 1839, after the death of his first wife.
Alfred H. Miles in the first decade of the last century noted that her work was neglected: it "had a greater charm for her own generation than it can ever have again.
Virginia H. Blain in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography notes that her "Tales of the Factories were among the earliest of that kind of protest poetry, preceding both Caroline Norton's and Elizabeth Barrett's works in the genre.
[citation needed] Caroline Southey's poem To Death was composed as a song by Grace Williams in 1953.