Poet and translator. Born in Chester, she was the eldest daughter of Allen Holford (c. 1755–1788) and his wife Margaret (c. 1761–1834), a poet, playwright and Minerva Press novelist. Margaret Hodson married, as his fourth wife, the Anglican clergyman, Septimus Hodson in 1826. She wrote prolifically as a child and published her first work, the anonymous metrical romance Wallace, or, The Fight of Falkirk, in 1809. It was followed by Poems (1811), Margaret of Anjou (1816), The Past (1819), Warbeck of Wolfstein (1820) and a set of translations, Italian Stories (1823). Southey and Hodson first met in 1827, when he accepted her invitation to stay with her during his visit to Harrogate of that year; they soon became regular correspondents. Southey had first heard of Hodson, though, when his friend, Reginald Heber, showed him some of her poetry during their visit to the home of Charles Watkin Williams Wynn in 1820. Her final work, The Lives of Nunez de Balboa and Francisco Pizarro (1832), a translation from Spanish, was dedicated to Southey.