Charlotte Turner Smith: Poems

Novelist and poet

Smith believed that her poetry, not her novels, granted her respectability.

Smith's husband fled to France to escape his creditors. She joined him there until, thanks largely to her, he was able to return to England.

After Benjamin Smith was released from prison, the entire family moved to Dieppe, France to avoid further creditors. Charlotte returned to negotiate with them, but failed to come to an agreement. She went back to France and in 1784 began translating works from French into English. In 1787 she published The Romance of Real Life, consisting of translated selections on François Gayot de Pitaval's trials. She was forced to withdraw her other translation, Manon Lescaut, after it was argued that the work was immoral and plagiarised. In 1786, she published it anonymously.[3]

In 1785, the family returned to England and moved to Woolbeding House near Midhurst, Sussex.[3] Smith's relations with her husband did not improve and on 15 April 1787 she left him after 22 years of marriage, writing that she might "have been contented to reside in the same house with him" had not "his temper been so capricious and often so cruel," so that her "life was not safe".[4] When Charlotte left Benjamin, she did not secure a legal agreement to protect her profits – he would have access to them under English primogeniture laws.[3] Smith knew that her children's future rested on a successful settlement of the lawsuit over her father-in-law's will, and so made every effort to earn enough money to fund the suit and retain the family's genteel status.[4]

Smith claimed the position of gentlewoman, signing herself "Charlotte Smith of Bignor Park" on the title page of Elegiac Sonnets.[3] 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[3] 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. As Sarah Zimmerman claimed in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, "She prized her verse for the role it gave her as a private woman whose sorrows were submitted only reluctantly to the public."[3]

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".[4] 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".[4] Her novels contributed to the development of Gothic fiction and the novel of sensibility.[3]

Smith's novels include autobiographical characters and events. While a common device at the time, Antje Blank writes in The Literary Encyclopedia, "few exploited fiction's potential of self-representation with such determination as Smith."[4] For example, Mr and Mrs Stafford in Emmeline are portraits of Charlotte and Benjamin.[3] She suffered sorely throughout her life. Her mother died in childbirth when Charlotte was three. Charlotte's own first child died a day after her second child, Benjamin Berney, was born and Benjamin lived only ten years. The prefaces to Smith's novels told of her own struggles, including the deaths of several of her children. According to Zimmerman, "Smith mourned most publicly for her daughter Anna Augusta, who married an émigré... and died aged twenty in 1795."[3] Smith's prefaces placed her as a suffering sentimental heroine and as a vocal critic of laws that kept her and her children in poverty.[4]

The Young Philosopher was Smith's last novel and a piece of "outspoken radical fiction".[4]

Smith's experiences led her to argue for legal reforms that would grant women more rights, making the case for these in her novels. Her stories showed the "legal, economic, and sexual exploitation" of women by marriage and property laws. Initially readers were swayed by her arguments; writers such as William Cowper patronised her. However, as years passed readers became exhausted by Smith's stories of struggle and inequality. The public shifted to the view of the poet Anna Seward, who called Smith "vain" and "indelicate" for exposing her husband to "public contempt".[4]

Smith moved frequently due to financial concerns and declining health. In the last 20 years of her life, she lived in: Chichester, Brighton, Storrington, Bath, Exmouth, Weymouth, Oxford, London, Frant, and Elstead. She eventually settled at Tilford, Surrey.[3]

Smith became involved with English radicals while living in Brighton in 1791–1793. Like them, she supported the French Revolution and its republican principles. Her epistolary novel Desmond tells of a man journeying to revolutionary France and convinced of the rightness of the revolution. He contends that England should be reformed as well. The novel was published in June 1792, a year before France and Britain went to war and before the Reign of Terror began, which shocked the public, turning them against the revolutionaries.[3] Like many radicals, Smith criticised the French, but retained the original ideals of the revolution.[3] To support her family, Smith had to sell her works, and so was eventually forced, as Blank claims, to "tone down the radicalism that had characterised the authorial voice in Desmond and adopt more oblique techniques to express her libertarian ideals".[4] She set her next novel, The Old Manor House (1793) in the American War of Independence, which allowed her to discuss democratic reform without directly addressing the French situation. However, her last novel, The Young Philosopher (1798), was a final piece of "outspoken radical fiction".[4] Her protagonist leaves Britain for a more hopeful America.

The Old Manor House is "frequently deemed [Smith's] best" novel for its sentimental themes and development of minor characters. Novelist Walter Scott labelled it as such, and poet and critic Anna Laetitia Barbauld chose it for her anthology The British Novelists (1810).[3] As a successful novelist and poet, Smith communicated with famous artists and thinkers of the day, including musician Charles Burney (father of Frances Burney), poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, scientist and poet Erasmus Darwin, lawyer and radical Thomas Erskine, novelist Mary Hays, playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and poet Robert Southey.[3] An array of periodicals reviewed her works, including the Anti-Jacobin Review, the Analytical Review, the British Critic, The Critical Review, the European Magazine, the Gentleman's Magazine, the Monthly Magazine, and the Universal Magazine.[3]

Smith earned most money between 1787 and 1798, after which she was no longer so popular; several reasons have been given for the declining public interest, including "erosion of the quality of her work after so many years of literary labour, an eventual waning of readerly interest as she published, on average, one work per year for twenty-two years, and a controversy that attached to her public profile" as she wrote on the French Revolution.[3] Both radical and conservative periodicals criticized her novels about the revolution. Her insistence on pursuing a lawsuit over Richard Smith's inheritance lost her several patrons. Her increasingly blunt prefaces made her less appealing.[3]

To continue earning money, Smith began writing in less politically charged genres.[4] This included a collection of tales, Letters of a Solitary Wanderer (1801–1802) and the play What Is She? (1799, attributed). Her most successful foray was into children's books: Rural Walks (1795), Rambles Farther (1796), Minor Morals (1798), and Conversations Introducing Poetry (1804). She also wrote two volumes of a history of England (1806) and A Natural History of Birds (1807, posthumous). Her return to poetry, Beachy Head and Other Poems (1807) also appeared posthumously.[3] Publishers paid less for these, however, and by 1803 Smith was poverty-stricken. She could barely afford food or coal. She even sold her beloved library of 500 books to pay off debts, but feared being sent to jail for the remaining £20.[4]


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