The daughter of a Kent rector who had been an Oxford fellow, Caroline read voraciously on both religious and secular matters throughout her childhood.
She was wedded to her faith, a moderate Anglicanism that rejected as excessive the attitudes of Edward Bouverie Pusey and the Oxford Movement: she wrote "We have abundance of technical terms but have we the spirit of the Gospel?
"[2] She was born in 1786 and spent her childhood living at the rectory of St John the Baptist Church in Wittersham, Kent, where her father was rector from 1778.
Despite her refusal of his offer of marriage, Caroline remained a close friend of Sismondi and from 1826 to 1828 she spent time as a tenant of his family home, in Pescia Italy.
[7] She showed herself well informed on developments in education that had been made in continental Europe and in the United States, and argued for the need to make education a pleasure and relevant to the concerns of the students, since ‘religion unaccompanied by knowledge degenerates into superstition.’[8] Her compilation - "Christian Sects in the Nineteenth Century, In a Series of Letters to a Lady" published in 1846, by William Pickering, London,( Project Gutenberg eBook), is interesting.
Caroline Cornwallis, like Aspasia, was a woman who remained in the shadows herself but who found a voice to speak for causes that would lead to some of the major changes that marked not just her own nation but many others after her death in 1858.