Caroline Clive.

Writer. Caroline Clive, the daughter of a lawyer and a member of the landed gentry, was born into what should have been comfortable circumstances. Instead, owing in part to her lameness—the result of infantile paralysis—and her homely appearance, Clive was an unhappy child who developed a fascination with death and the macabre that marked the whole of her life as well as her literary career. Like other aspiring female writers of her time (the Brontë sisters, for example), she posed as a man in order to get a fair evaluation of her abilities from the accomplished male writers of her time, individuals such as the philosopher Dugald Stewart and the Reverend Archer Clive, who would become her husband. In the spring of 1840, when she published her first book of poetry, IX Poems, she did so under a pseudonym, V, which was Archer Clive’s pet name for her. That autumn, aged thirty-nine, she married the Reverend Clive, with whom she would have two children: a daughter, Alice, and a son, Meysey. IX Poems consists of nine works, all of which concern death. When Clive published a revised version of the collection the next year, the nine new poems she included also addressed the subject. I Watched the Heavens: A Poem, published in 1842, was set in a fictitious world where there is no death, although its inhabitants employ death as their organizing principle. Clive continued to publish in this vein for fifteen years before she came out with a work that truly captured the public’s attention, and overshadowed all that came before and would come after. Paul Ferroll, a sensationalistic murder mystery, was followed by more novels and several other poetry collections, but Clive continued to be known—and published—as “the author of Paul Ferroll.” Clive suffered a paralytic stroke in 1865, but she managed to continue writing poetry until her death in 1872. She was killed by a fire after a spark set fire to her dressing gown. Clive’s accidental and shocking mode of death earned her obituaries in The Times of London as well as The New York Times, and these notices were perhaps the most prestigious ones she ever had. Her focus on death, her religiosity, and her limited poetic gifts allowed for respectful reviews during her lifetime but have resulted in obscurity in more recent times.