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...
Friends, Associates
Elizabeth Cobbold
EC
corresponded with members of the London scientific intelligentsia: Sir James Edward Smith
, first President of the Linnean Society
(who encouraged Charlotte Smith
to introduce botanical information into her novels, but proved singularly unhelpful...
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.
Friends, Associates
William Cowper
Notable among Cowper's other friends were the Rev John Newton
(a former slave-trader who since his conversion had become a hellfire Evangelical preacher), Lady Austen
(who set him the writing task commemorated in the title...
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)
...
Friends, Associates
Eliza Fenwick
EF
was well known to many of the English radicals of the 1790s: besides those already mentioned, she knew Charlotte Smith
and Samuel Taylor Coleridge
.
Paul, Lissa. Eliza Fenwick, Early Modern Feminist. University of Delaware Press.
72
A particularly close and lifelong friend was Mary Hays
Family and Intimate relationships
Eliza Parsons
Her next child, Mary, was baptised in Plymouth on 30 April 1762, and a son, William, on 13 February 1765. In all she had eight children, five daughters and three sons. All of the sons...