Caroline Cornwallis

Caroline Frances Cornwallis (1786 – 8 January 1858) was an English feminist writer. Her father, William Cornwallis, belonged to the junior branch of the better known military and naval family. The daughter of a Kent rector who had been an Oxford fellow, Caroline read voraciously on both religious and secular matters throughout her childhood. Later, she travelled widely for her times, to Italy and to Malta. She mastered Greek, Latin and Hebrew, and also among modern languages, Italian, German and French. She also worked on Icelandic and other Scandinavian languages.

When it came to her turn to take up the pen, she built herself a role as a discreet, usually anonymous, voice for the underprivileged and under-educated. If the widest group she championed in this way were the poor in Victorian England, she also spoke out for the rights of women. 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?"

Early life

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. Her mother, Mary Cornwallis, published Observations, Critical, Explanatory and Practical on the Canonical Scriptures, in 1817.