page_title: Caroline de Crespigny
section_title: Heidelberg
hierarchical_section_title: Caroline de Crespigny / Heidelberg
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Altersbild Justinus Kerner, wenige Jahre vor seinem Tod aufgenommen, Ausschnitt English: Picture of Justinus Kerner in old age, taken a few years before his death
context_page_description: Caroline Champion de Crespigny was an early 19th-century English poet and translator. In the tradition of Romanticism, she published My Souvenir, or, Poems in 1844. Her translations, mainly from German into English, were often made in collaboration with Thomas Medwin, the cousin and biographer of Percy Bysshe Shelley.
context_section_description: A decision was made around 1840 to relocate the family to Heidelberg in Grand Duchy of Baden, Germany, where there was a small English literary community.  It was in Heidelberg in 1841 that de Crespigny met the "friend", mentioned in the preface to her collection of poems, My Souvenir published in 1844. Thomas Medwin was the cousin and biographer of Percy Bysshe Shelly and Lord Byron. Their shared knowledge of Byron may have been a catalyst to their lasting intimacy. In 1842 Medwin published a novel Lady Singleton where de Crespigny's verse appears at the head of some chapters and she is probably "the high-born and highly gifted lady" that Medwin thanks in his preface for the novel. Neither was financially secure enough to divorce their spouse, and the relationship was primarily intellectual. They spent the next twenty years until de Crespigny's death in 1861 participating in the literary life of this university city . Their mixed German and English friends included, amongst others, Fanny Brawne Lindon, a lover and muse of John Keats and Mary and William Howitt. In 1848 Revolution swept through Germany including Heidelberg and de Crespigny and Medwin thought it judicious to exit to more peaceable Weinsberg in Wurttemberg where their host was poet, Justinus Kerner.
caption: Justinus Kerner in old age
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