Charlotte Smith

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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.
qtd. in
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, 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.
36
, No. 2, 23 Jan. 2014, pp. 17-19.
19
Stipple engraving by Pierre Condé of Charlotte Smith, from portrait by George Romney, 1792, in the National Portrait Gallery. The engraving appeared as frontispiece to volume 2 of "Elegiac Sonnets", 8th ed., 1797. This is a head-and-shoulders view. She is looking down, wearing a simple, light, gauzy dress, and a high bonnet with a large bow in front over her curling hair. The portrait is surrounded by a decorative swirl design, and underneath her name is written in block letters.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Intertextuality and Influence Anne Bannerman
Her model for the sonnet, as well as for the use of male erotic voices from Petrarch and Goethe , was Charlotte Smith , though AB 's tone is more unrestrained and impassioned than Smith's.
Elfenbein, Andrew. Romantic Genius: The Prehistory of a Homosexual Role. Columbia University Press, 1999.
135-6
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 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 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, 2000, 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...
Leisure and Society Jane Austen
Art historian Richard James Wheeler , a strong supporter of the Rice portrait, also argued that a watercolour sketch by James Stanier Clarke , the Prince of Wales's librarian (a full-length portrait of only six...
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...
Literary responses Elizabeth Meeke
The Literary Journal began its notice with several paragraphs of comment on the status of the novel in general. It found Lafontaine's novel good in parts, but uneven, and Meeke's translation good in general, but...
Literary responses Helen Maria Williams
A respectful review by Mary Wollstonecraft in the Analytical praised Williams's calm domestic scenes,
Wollstonecraft, Mary. The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft. Editors Todd, Janet and Marilyn Butler, Pickering, 1989, 7 vols.
7: 251
her landscapes, and her convincing characters from nature, as well as the feminine sweetness in her style and...
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.
qtd. in
Hays, Mary. The Correspondence (1779-1843) of Mary Hays, British Novelist. Editor Brooks, Marilyn, Edwin Mellen, 2004.
244
Reviewers linked MH with Wollstonecraft, with results more often hostile than...
Literary responses Ann Radcliffe
The Italian won for AR the accolade of praise from Thomas James Matthias , scholar, editor, and librarian at Buckingham Palace, who invoked the shade of Ariosto to honour her in the same place...
Literary responses Caroline Norton
The pamphlet was not well received: the public appeared to be suffering from compassion fatigue. In opposing CN 's plan of writing to the Times, Melbourne called her a sobbing, moaning, and complaining woman...
Literary responses Jane Austen
But of readers whose responses survive, most were delighted. These included Sarah Harriet Burney —who, however, thought (apparently along with plenty of others) that Catherine Ann Dorset , sister of Charlotte Smith , might be...
Literary responses Ann Batten Cristall
The Critical Review discerned in the collection considerable merit and the hand of genius: so much so that it felt it safe to overlook a few blemishes (though it mentioned some for the sake...
Literary responses Anne Hunter
Isobel Armstrong has compared Carisbrook Castle to Charlotte Smith 's Beachy Head.
Armstrong, Isobel, and Anne Hunter. “Introduction”. The Life and Poems of Anne Hunter, Haydn’s Tuneful Voice, Liverpool University Press, 2009, pp. 1-11.
10
Literary responses Amelia Opie
The Critical Review introduced its laudatory notice by praising the current standard of women's poetry (a tradition, it says, less than a century old). It invokes the canonical names of Seward , Barbauld , and...

Timeline

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Texts

Smith, Charlotte. Rambles Farther. 1st ed., T. Cadell, Jr. and W. Davies, 1796, 2 vols.
Smith, Charlotte. Rural Walks. 1st ed., T. Cadell, Jr. and W. Davies, 1795, 2 vols.
Smith, Charlotte. The Banished Man. 1st ed., T. Cadell, Jr. and W. Davies, 1794, 4 vols.
Smith, Charlotte. The Collected Letters of Charlotte Smith. Editor Stanton, Judith Phillips, Indiana University Press, 2003.
Smith, Charlotte. The Emigrants. 1st ed., T. Cadell, 1793.
Smith, Charlotte, and Mary Hays. The History of England. 1st ed., Richard Phillips, 1806, 3 vols.
Smith, Charlotte. The Natural History of Birds. 1st ed., J. Johnson, 1807, 2 vols.
Smith, Charlotte. The Old Manor House. 1st ed., J. Bell, 1793, 4 vols.
Smith, Charlotte. The Poems of Charlotte Smith. Editor Curran, Stuart, Oxford University Press, 1993.
Gayot de Pitaval, François. The Romance of Real Life. Translator Smith, Charlotte, 1st ed., T. Cadell, 1787, 3 vols.
Smith, Charlotte. The Wanderings of Warwick. 1st ed., J. Bell, 1794.
Smith, Charlotte. The Young Philosopher. 1st ed., T. Cadell, Jr. and W. Davies, 1798, 4 vols.
Smith, Charlotte. The Young Philosopher. Editor Kraft, Elizabeth, University Press of Kentucky, 1999.
Smith, Charlotte. What Is She?. 1st ed., T. N. Longman and O. Rees, 1799.