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.
Trainer, James, and Clara Reeve. “Introduction”. The Old English Baron, Oxford University Press.
xviii
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
(who was also a good friend to other women writers from around the British Isles: to...
Textual Production
Clara Reeve
Her publisher, Dilly
, paid her £10 for the copyright.
Trainer, James, and Clara Reeve. “Introduction”. The Old English Baron, Oxford University Press.
xii
In CR
's exaggeratedly humble preface she acknowledges her work to be the literary offspring of the Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole
—whom...
Material Conditions of Writing
Mary Robinson
MR
became a poet during her adolescence. Like Charlotte Smith
after her, she began gathering her poems for publication while living with her husband in debtors' prison.
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Robinson
MR
's preface quotes that of Charlotte Smith
to her Elegiac Sonnets.
Robinson, Mary. “Introduction”. Mary Robinson: Selected Poems, edited by Judith Pascoe, Broadview, pp. 19-64.
45
She presents her own work as one of scholarship, explaining that by legitimate in her title she means the sonnet in...
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...
Literary responses
Frances Sheridan
The novel in its first form was hugely successful: it brought FS
instant fame. Johnson
teasingly expressed doubts about her moral right to make your readers suffer so much.
Sheridan, Frances. “Introduction”. Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph, edited by Jean Coates Cleary et al., World’s Classics, Oxford University Press.
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.
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...
Leisure and Society
Henrietta Sykes
In her diary for 1813 recorded New Year celebrations with much conviviality: she and her guests, she wrote, danced like lunatics. She also listed good novels she had recently read. They included The School for...
Wealth and Poverty
Elizabeth Thomas
This was the low point (so far) in Thomas's life. Gwinnett had changed his will less than three weeks before his death, and left her 600 pounds, but his family ensured that it did not...
Friends, Associates
Mary Tighe
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)
...
Textual Features
Sarah Trimmer
In addition to Catharine Cappe
's work on Sunday schools and versions of fairy stories by Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy
, the magazine reviewed work by a whole library of didactic, pedagogical, or improving writers, reprinted as...
Textual Production
Helen Waddell
An earlier translator was Charlotte Smith
, whose version appeared in probably late 1785. George Saintsbury
supplied an introduction for Waddell's translation (which was reprinted in 1934). This work led to another, a play about...
Textual Production
Eglinton Wallace
It appeared in two different editions put out this year through the different publishers T. Hookham
, and Debrett
. The Debrett edition lists the price, one shilling and sixpence, on the title-page.
“Eighteenth Century Collections Online”. Gale Databases.
Goethe's novel...
Textual Features
Jane Warton
It seems that at least JW
's brother Joseph (whose published critique of Pope's poetry helped reshape literary opinion) was open to influence from her critical judgement; this raises at least the possibility that some...
