Caroline Wigley Clive (née Meysey-Wigley; 24 June 1801 – 13 July 1873) was an English writer known by the pseudonym V. She was known chiefly as the author of IX Poems that when first published, took their place in the forefront of then-contemporary feminine verse.
Clive wrote all her life, was a brilliant conversationalist, was held in the highest regard within an exceptionally notable intellectual circle, and carried on a large correspondence.
Later came Dr. John Brown, in his Hone Subsecivce, echoing Hartley Coleridge's Greek of the roses, and adding: "They contain rare excellency; the concentration, the finish, the gravity ol a man's thought, with the tenderness, the insight, the constitutional sorrowfulness of a woman's—her purity, her passionateness, her delicate and keen sense and experience.
The second story was, however, in no way equal to the first; and a subsequent novel, John Greswold, which appeared in 1864, was decidedly inferior to its predecessors, although containing passages of considerable literary merit.
She anticipated the work of Wilkie Collins, Charles Reade, Miss Braddon, and many others of their school, in showing human nature as expressed by its energies, neither diagnosing it like a physician, nor analysing it like a priest.
Even the slightest additions showed inestimable technique if in common with her longer poems of "The Queen's Ball", "Valley of the Rea", and "The Morlas", though they were characterized as being 'somewhat thin of substance'.
Nonetheless, none failed to yield 'immortal phrases five words long', and certain ones recalled Shakespeare's metaphor of the dolphin showing its shining back above the element it moves in.