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 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...
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 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...
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 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 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 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 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 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...
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.
qtd. in
Sheridan, Frances. “Introduction”. Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph, edited by Jean Coates Cleary et al., World’s Classics, Oxford University Press, 1995.
xi
Boswell praised the Christian morality...
Literary responses Sarah Harriet Burney
Charles Burney , too, slighted his youngest daughter's work in comparison with the elder's.
Burney, Sarah Harriet. “Editor’s Introduction”. The Letters of Sarah Harriet Burney, edited by Lorna J. Clark, Georgia University Press, 1997.
lxii
Jane Austen later noted that Clarentine seemed good on the first reading, not so good on the second, and unnatural...
Literary responses Julia Kavanagh
The Athenæum's review compared her skills favourably with those of Charlotte Smith . However, it noted how far Smith's once high reputation had declined, and seemed to anticipate the same fate for Sybil's Second...

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.