Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Charlotte Smith
-
Standard Name: Smith, Charlotte
Birth Name: Charlotte Turner
Married Name: Charlotte Smith
CS
, poet and novelist of the later eighteenth century, continued her output especially of children's books, into the very early nineteenth century. She wrote her poems for pleasure, her remarkable, now edited letters for relief from the struggles of a difficult life, but her novels (she said) only by necessity.
Blain, Virginia, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy, editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
996
Many of the latter have foreign settings, not for mere exoticism but to further a political critique which takes a global view. All her writing was done at high speed: she found it hard or impossible to make her income cover the unremitting expenses of her large dependent family. A critic has recently pronounced that the best of [her] writings . . . should be recognised as among the greatest works of the period.
Barrell, John. “To Stir up the People”. London Review of Books, Vol.
"Charlotte Smith" Retrieved from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CharlotteSmithElegy.jpg.This work is licensed under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication license. This work is in the public domain.
Her next child, Mary, was baptised in Plymouth on 30 April 1762, and a son, William, on 13 February 1765. In all she had eight children, five daughters and three sons. All of the sons...
Before she left London, MT
met there her fellow Irish poet Tom Moore
. He subsequently visited her in Dublin and complimented her in verse. She exchanged poems with Barbarina Wilmot (later Lady Dacre)
...
Friends, Associates
Eliza Fenwick
EF
was well known to many of the English radicals of the 1790s: besides those already mentioned, she knew Charlotte Smith
and Samuel Taylor Coleridge
.
Paul, Lissa. Eliza Fenwick, Early Modern Feminist. University of Delaware Press, 2019.
72
A particularly close and lifelong friend was Mary Hays
Trainer, James, and Clara Reeve. “Introduction”. The Old English Baron, Oxford University Press, 1977.
xviii
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/, http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
(who was also a good friend to other women writers from around the British Isles: to...
Friends, Associates
Elizabeth Cobbold
EC
corresponded with members of the London scientific intelligentsia: Sir James Edward Smith
, first President of the Linnean Society
(who encouraged Charlotte Smith
to introduce botanical information into her novels, but proved singularly unhelpful...
Friends, Associates
Robert Southey
Having early in his life admired writers like Mary Wollstonecraft
and Charlotte Smith
, he later numbered women writers such as Anna Eliza Bray
among his close friends.
Friends, Associates
William Cowper
Notable among Cowper's other friends were the Rev John Newton
(a former slave-trader who since his conversion had become a hellfire Evangelical preacher), Lady Austen
(who set him the writing task commemorated in the title...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mrs F. C. Patrick
The narrative is at first somewhat flat-footed in its insistence that this is not a novel, but it acquires further flavour whenever the old gentleman telling it becomes self-referential. His daughter, he says, acts the...
Intertextuality and Influence
Ann Radcliffe
The heroine, Adeline, is not merely a poet but also a genius. Her poems are interspersed in the narrative, which is the earliest example of the mature Radcliffe formula with the typical Radcliffe villain, Phillipe...
Intertextuality and Influence
Jane Loudon
The same year, 1840, JL
issued another book for children: The Young Naturalist's Journey: or the Travels of Agnes Merton with her Mama, a hybrid of entertainment and pedagogy in the style of Charlotte Smith
Intertextuality and Influence
Ann Radcliffe
Influences on AR
's writings include the opera, contemporary travel writers, and Joseph Priestley
's Course of Lectures on Oratory and Criticism, 1777.
Norton, Rictor. Mistress of Udolpho: The Life of Ann Radcliffe. Leicester University Press, 1999.
67
AR
probably helped to produce the fashion for literary quotation...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Hays
Among the book's contents are poems and fiction (including dream visions and an Oriental tale. Titles like Cleora, or the Misery Attending Unsuitable Connections and Josepha, or pernicious Effects of early Indulgence foreground Hays's didactic...
Intertextuality and Influence
Emily Frederick Clark
Quotations heading chapters come from Milton
and other mostly modern poets, including Charlotte Smith
and Mary Robinson
. Other inset poems may be EFC
's own.
McLeod, Deborah. The Minerva Press. University of Alberta, 1997.
The story opens as Portuguese peasants encounter a fainting...
Intertextuality and Influence
Judith Sargent Murray
She backs this pleasure in modernity with a remarkable grasp of former female history and of the women's literary tradition in English and its contexts. She mentions the Greek foremother Sappho
, the patriotic heroism...
A British party under James Wolfe
climbed the Heights of Abraham at Quebec and beat the French in battle there.
1775
The first, posthumous, printing of Thomas Gray
's sonnet on the death of Richard West
caused a literary sensation; it laid the foundation for Charlotte Smith
's Elegiac Sonnets, 1784, and the revival of the sonnet form.
1780
James Harrison
(hitherto chiefly known as a music publisher) began to issue the handsomely-produced Novelists' Magazine, a weekly serial reprinting of canonical novels.
April 1789
The Gentleman's Magazine published Anna Seward
's selection of living celebrated Female Poets.
By June 1789
William Lisle Bowles
published Fourteen Sonnets, Elegiac and Descriptive, Written during a Tour.
2 September 1793
Henrietta O'Neill
, Irish writer and patron, died. She had opened a private theatre at her seat, Shane's Castle in County Antrim, and also supported the theatre in Belfast.
William Beckford
published a second and more marked burlesque attack on women's writing: Azemia: A Descriptive and Sentimental Novel. Interspersed with Pieces of Poetry.
December 1802
The Critical Review extolled the quality of contemporary women's poetry: Miss Seward
, Mrs Barbauld
, Charlotte Smith
, will take their place among the English poets for centuries to come.
Alexander Dyce
, then a twenty-seven-year-old reluctant clergyman, published his Specimens of British Poetesses, a project in rediscovering women's literary history.
Texts
Smith, Charlotte. A Narrative of the Loss of the Catharine, Venus, and Piedmont Transports. Sampson Low, 1796.
Smith, Charlotte. Beachy Head. Joseph Johnson, 1807.
Smith, Charlotte. Celestina. T. Cadell, 1791.
Smith, Charlotte. Conversations, Introducing Poetry. Joseph Johnson, 1804.
Smith, Charlotte. Conversations, Introducing Poetry. J. Sharpe, 1815.
Smith, Charlotte. Desmond. G. G. J. and J. Robinson, 1792.
Smith, Charlotte. Elegiac Sonnets. J. Dodsley, 1784.
Smith, Charlotte. Elegiac Sonnets. T. Cadell, 1789.
Smith, Charlotte. Elegiac Sonnets. T. Cadell; W. Davies, 1797.
Smith, Charlotte. “Introduction”. The Old Manor House, edited by Anne Henry Ehrenpreis, Oxford University Press, 1969, p. v - xxx.
Smith, Charlotte. “Introduction”. Emmeline, the Orphan of the Castle, edited by Anne Henry Ehrenpreis, Oxford University Press, 1971.
Smith, Charlotte. “Introduction”. Elegiac Sonnets 1789, edited by Jonathan Wordsworth, Woodstock Books, 1992.
Smith, Charlotte. “Introduction”. The Poems of Charlotte Smith, edited by Stuart Curran, Oxford University Press, 1993, p. xix - xxix.
Smith, Charlotte. “Introduction”. The Collected Letters of Charlotte Smith, edited by Judith Phillips Stanton, Indiana University Press, 2003, p. i - xlv.
Smith, Charlotte. “Introduction”. The Works of Charlotte Smith, edited by Michael Garner, Karla M. Taylor, and Karla M. Taylor, Pickering and Chatto, 2005, p. xxix - xxxvii.
Smith, Charlotte. Letters of a Solitary Wanderer. Sampson Low, 1799.