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.
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...
Textual Features
Mary Wollstonecraft
Though only about twenty percent of its extracts are written by women (the same proportion as from the Bible),
McCarthy, William. Anna Letitia Barbauld, Voice of the Enlightenment. The Johns Hopkins University Press.
501
this book is feminist in its emphasis on the virtue of independent judgement as...
MJY
foregrounds her own friendship with Anna Maria Crouch, and finds room for such details as the opinions of Crouch's father, Peregrine Phillips
, about novelists: he admired Charlotte Smith
, Anna Maria Bennett
,...
Textual Features
Lady Louisa Stuart
LLS
's letters to Scott
show her to have been a trusted and perceptive critic of his novels, which she often read before publication. On The Heart of Mid-Lothian she sent him a major critique...
Residence
Mary Russell Mitford
The first period of poverty after his marriage caused him to move his family from Alresford in Hampshire. (MRM
later remembered the Hampshire countryside with warm affection, and delighted in its nearness to...
Reception
Elizabeth Hervey
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...
Reception
Ann Jebb
George Dyer
warmly praised AJ
in his poem On Liberty, which appeared in his Poems of 1792. Since he also praised Wollstonecraft
's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Charlotte Smith
,...
Reception
Anne Plumptre
Antoinette was well reviewed. The Critical hailed a novel which neither endangered its readers' morals nor bored them with constant moralising. It dropped hints about the author's identity which amounted to puffing, saying it believed...
Reception
Rosina Bulwer Lytton, Baroness Lytton
Her husband, Edward Bulwer (later Bulwer Lytton)
, was embarrassed by Cheveley, seeing himself in the portrait of Lord De Clifford and his predilection for governesses,
Sutherland, John. The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction. Stanford University Press.
119
and tried to block the novel's production...
Reception
Adelaide O'Keeffe
The Monthly Review was on the whole complimentary. It judged the novel to be original and entertaining, though it complained of a few Hibernicisms and grammatical errors. It concentrated, oddly, on the Don Zulvago plot...
Publishing
Anna Hume
The author's name appears respectfully as Mris [i.e. Mistress] Anna Hume. The main title-page prints Love, Chastitie, and Death one below the other and brackets them. The Triumph of Chastitie and The...
Publishing
Charlotte Brooke
Her father had cherished a never-executed project for a history of ancient Irish literature.
Ashley, Leonard R. N. et al. “Introduction”. Reliques of Irish Poetry, Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, p. v - xv.
vi
She had issued Proposals for this work the year before publication. The Houghton Library
copy of the Proposals incorporates a...
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.
Publishing
Sarah Harriet Burney
While struggling to finish this work, SHB
called it my own eternal rubbish
Burney, Sarah Harriet. The Letters of Sarah Harriet Burney. Editor Clark, Lorna J., University of Georgia Press.
130
and my long plague.
Burney, Sarah Harriet. The Letters of Sarah Harriet Burney. Editor Clark, Lorna J., University of Georgia Press.
153
By October 1811 she felt she had her plot organised and almost all her allocations of...
