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.
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...
Friends, Associates
Robert Southey
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.
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.
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...
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...
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...
Travel
Ann Radcliffe
Within a month or so they were off again, to the English Lake District, visiting their relations in the north on the way (AR
's parents were now settled in Chesterfield). This...
Intertextuality and Influence
Ann Radcliffe
The heroine, Adeline, is not merely a poet but also a genius. Her poems are interspersed in the narrative, which is the earliest example of the mature Radcliffe formula with the typical Radcliffe villain, Phillipe...
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Ann Radcliffe
Influences on AR
's writings include the opera, contemporary travel writers, and Joseph Priestley
's Course of Lectures on Oratory and Criticism, 1777.
Norton, Rictor. Mistress of Udolpho: The Life of Ann Radcliffe. Leicester University Press.
67
AR
probably helped to produce the fashion for literary quotation...
Wealth and Poverty
Mary Ann Radcliffe
At first MAR
's money was tied up in a trust, so that her husband had no access to it, but this situation did not last. Her family life began in poverty and became worse...
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...
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...
Timeline
No timeline events available.
Texts
Smith, Charlotte. The Banished Man. T. Cadell, Jr. and W. Davies, 1794.
Smith, Charlotte. The Collected Letters of Charlotte Smith. Editor Stanton, Judith Phillips, Indiana University Press, 2003.
Smith, Charlotte. The Emigrants. T. Cadell, 1793.
Smith, Charlotte, and Mary Hays. The History of England. Richard Phillips, 1806.
Smith, Charlotte. The Natural History of Birds. J. Johnson, 1807.
Smith, Charlotte. The Old Manor House. J. Bell, 1793.
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, T. Cadell, 1787.
Smith, Charlotte. The Wanderings of Warwick. J. Bell, 1794.
Smith, Charlotte. The Young Philosopher. T. Cadell, Jr. and W. Davies, 1798.
Smith, Charlotte. The Young Philosopher. Editor Kraft, Elizabeth, University Press of Kentucky, 1999.
Smith, Charlotte. What Is She?. T. N. Longman and O. Rees, 1799.
