Charlotte Smith Biography

Charlotte Smith (née Turner; 4 May 1749 – 28 October 1806), an English novelist
and poet of the Romantic period, prompted a revival of the English sonnet,[1]
helped to set conventions for Gothic fiction and wrote political novels of
sensibility. Despite ten novels, four children's books and other works, she saw
herself mainly as a poet, expecting to be remembered for her Elegiac Sonnets.
[2] She is credited with turning the sonnet into an expression of woeful
sentiment.[3] She left her husband and began writing to support their children.
Her struggles for legal independence as a woman affect her poetry, novels and
autobiographical prefaces. Her early novels show development in
sentimentality. Later ones such as Desmond and The Old Manor House praised
the ideals of the French Revolution. Waning interest left her destitute by 1803.
Barely able to hold a pen, she sold her book collection to pay debts and died in
1806. Largely forgotten by the mid-19th century, she has since been seen as a
major Romantic writer. .[5] Elegiac Sonnets (1784) achieved instant success,
allowing Charlotte to pay for their release from prison. Smith's sonnets helped
initiate a revival of the form and granted an aura of respectability to her later
novels, as poetry was then considered the highest art. Smith revised Elegiac
Poems several times over the years, eventually creating a two-volume work.[5]
Smith claimed the position of gentlewoman, signing herself "Charlotte Smith of
Bignor Park" on the title page of Elegiac Sonnets.[4] All her works were
published under her own name, "a daring decision" for a woman at the time.
Her success as a poet allowed her to make this choice[4] and she identified
herself as a poet throughout her career. Although she published far more prose
than poetry and her novels brought her more money and fame, she believed
poetry would bring her respectability.
After leaving her husband, Smith moved to a town near Chichester and decided
to write novels, as they would make more money than poetry. Her first one,
Emmeline (1788), was a success, selling 1500 copies within months. She wrote
nine more in the next ten years: Ethelinde (1789), Celestina (1791), Desmond
(1792), The Old Manor House (1793), The Wanderings of Warwick (1794), The
Banished Man (1794), Montalbert (1795), Marchmont (1796), and The Young
Philosopher (1798). Smith was beginning her novelist career at a time when
women's fiction was expected to focus on romance and to focus on "a chaste
and flawless heroine subjected to repeated melodramatic distresses until
reinstated in society by the virtuous hero".[5] Although Smith's novels
employed this structure, they also included political commentary, notably
support of the French Revolution through her male characters. At times, she
challenged the typical romance plot by including "narratives of female desire" or
"tales of females suffering despotism".[5] Her novels contributed to the
development of Gothic fiction and the novel of sensibility.[4]

Smith was always interested in poetry, so she started working on a collection of

sonnets, which she first published in 1784. They were so popular that the
publishers kept re-printing them, and every time they printed a new edition,
Smith would add another preface and a few more sonnets, until eventually the
Elegiac Sonnets became a two-volume collection. "Elegiac" means that the
sonnets are "elegies," or mournful poems. The sonnets are almost all sad and
miserable—go figure, when you think what Smith was going through as she
wrote them. "To Melancholy" was written in 1785, so it wasn't one of the
original sonnets from the 1784 edition, but it has since become one of the more
famous ones. It's sometimes referred to by its number in the final collection—
XXXII. In it, the poet is hanging out by the banks of a river, listening to the wind
and watching the mist rise up off of the chilly water. It's cold and damp and it's
getting dark… the perfect breeding ground for ghosts. She imagines she can see
the ghost of the poet Thomas Otway—someone she particularly admired. She
concludes by saying that she actually likes feeling melancholy.