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 et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
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.
It has been until recently a given of literary history that William Beckford
had his half-sister in his sights in his two burlesques on women's novel-writing. The title-page of the first quotes Pope
, thus...
Author summary
Eliza Haywood
EH
was the most prolific novelist by number of titles (even ignoring those doubtfully ascribed) between Aphra Behn
and Charlotte Smith
. She also wrote poems, plays, periodicals, conduct books, translation, and theatre history. Her...
Intertextuality and Influence
Eliza Haywood
A more recent generation of feminist scholars has succeeded in locating EH
in the developing tradition of women's fiction. Critic Mary Anne Schofield
has argued that her heroines are feisty feminists. Paula Backscheider
points out...
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...
Literary responses
Mary Hays
William Frend
had read the work in manuscript and been much pleased, though he took the liberty of suggesting a few revisions.
Hays, Mary. The Correspondence (1779-1843) of Mary Hays, British Novelist. Editor Brooks, Marilyn, Edwin Mellen.
244
Reviewers linked MH
with Wollstonecraft, with results more often hostile than...
Publishing
Mary Hays
MH
wrote a 22-page article on Charlotte Smith
for the 1800-1 issue of British Public Characters. She contributed a number of essays over a period of years for this annual series published by Richard Phillips
Textual Production
Mary Hays
It was MH
who finished Charlotte Smith
's History of England, published in 1806: Smith, in deteriorating health, had written to her about this project in July 1800. Hays added the third volume, taking...
Textual Features
Jane Harvey
The contents include descriptive and melancholy sonnets, satire, autobiography, and politics (including a poem on the horrors of slavery, addressed to William Wilberforce
, and another about the sorrow of a woman whose lover has...
This contains autobiographical fragments and insightful comments on other women writers. Objects of AG
's comment include Susan Ferrier
, Charlotte Smith
(whose poems AG
felt to be easy, flowing, and correct, but low on...
Textual Features
Ann Gomersall
AG
is remarkable not only for extending the novel's range out of the gentry into the mercantile class, but also in differentiating between various types of businessmen, more and less admirable, and various different attitudes...
Publishing
Elizabeth Gilding
The Westminster Magazine again printed a poem by Elizabeth Turner (formerly EG
) praising a woman poet: To Mrs [Charlotte] Smith
of Bignor Park, on Reading Her Poems lately Published (her Elegiac Sonnets of early June).
Pitcher, Edward W. Signatures and Pseudonyms of the Eighteenth-Century British Magazines: An Annotated Index in Three Volumes.
Textual Production
Eliza Fenwick
Charlotte Smith
knew of this work-in-progress on 26 July 1800, when she told Mary Hays
how she wished she could help EF
with money or moral support. On 31 October 1801 Hays noted that Thomas Underwood
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.
72
A particularly close and lifelong friend was Mary Hays
