Charlotte Smith (writer) facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Charlotte Smith
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Charlotte Smith by George Romney
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| Born | Charlotte Turner 4 May 1749 London, Great Britain |
| Died | 28 October 1806 (aged 57) Tilford, United Kingdom |
| Occupation | Poet and novelist |
| Nationality | English |
| Notable works |
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Charlotte Smith (born Charlotte Turner; 4 May 1749 – 28 October 1806) was an English writer. She was a poet and novelist who lived during a time when feelings and emotions were very important in literature. Her book Elegiac Sonnets (1784) helped bring sonnets back into style in England. She also helped create the rules for Gothic fiction, which is a type of story with mystery and spooky elements.
Charlotte Smith wrote ten novels, four children's books, and other works. But she always saw herself mainly as a poet. She hoped people would remember her for her poems. She started writing to support her many children after leaving her husband. Her struggles as a woman trying to be independent affected her writing. She is known for making sonnets a way to express sad feelings. Her early novels also showed a lot of emotion. Later, her novels like Desmond and The Old Manor House supported the ideas of the French Revolution.
By 1803, people were less interested in her books, and she became very poor. She sold her book collection to pay off debts. Charlotte Smith died in 1806. For a long time, she was mostly forgotten. But now, she is seen as a very important writer who came before the Romantic period.
Contents
Early Life and Education
Charlotte Turner was born in London on May 4, 1749. She was the oldest child of Nicholas Turner and Anna Towers, who were a wealthy family. She had two younger siblings, Nicholas and Catherine Ann. Charlotte's childhood was difficult because her mother died when she was young. Her father also spent money carelessly. After his wife died, her father traveled, and Charlotte and her siblings were raised by their aunt, Lucy Towers.
When Charlotte was six, she went to school in Chichester. She also took drawing lessons. Two years later, she moved to London with her aunt and sister. There, she went to a girls' school in Kensington. She learned dancing, drawing, music, and acting. Charlotte loved to read and wrote poems. Her father encouraged her writing. She even sent some poems to a magazine, but they were not published.
Marriage and First Book
When Charlotte's father returned to England, he had money problems. He had to sell some family property. In 1765, he married a rich woman named Henrietta Meriton. Charlotte left school at age 12 and was taught at home. Because of her father's money troubles, she was married at a young age. Her father accepted the marriage proposal for her.
Charlotte and her husband, Benjamin Smith, had twelve children. Sadly, six of them died before her. Their marriage was not happy. Charlotte disliked living in busy Cheapside and argued with her husband's family. They made fun of her for reading, writing, and drawing. Benjamin was often violent, unfaithful, and spent too much money. Only his father, Richard, saw Charlotte's writing talent.
Richard Smith owned farms in Barbados, which provided money for Charlotte and her family. Charlotte later spoke out against slavery in her books. In 1774, Charlotte persuaded Richard to set up Benjamin as a farmer in Hampshire. They lived there until 1783. Richard Smith worried about Charlotte and his grandchildren's future. He left most of his property to Charlotte's children in his will. However, he wrote the will himself, and it had legal problems. The money, worth a lot, was stuck in a special court for almost 40 years. Charlotte and her children received very little of it.
Benjamin illegally spent some of the money and ended up in a debtor's prison in December 1783. This was a place for people who owed money. Charlotte moved in with him there. It was in prison that she wrote and published her first book, Elegiac Sonnets (1784). The book was an instant success. It allowed Charlotte to pay for their release from prison. Her sonnets helped bring this type of poem back into fashion. They also gave her later novels a good reputation, as poetry was seen as the highest form of art. Charlotte revised Elegiac Sonnets many times, making it a two-volume work.
A Busy Writer
Charlotte's husband, Benjamin, went to France to escape people he owed money to. Charlotte joined him there. She helped him return to England.
After Benjamin was released from prison, the whole family moved to Dieppe, France. Charlotte went back to England to try and deal with their debts, but she couldn't reach an agreement. She returned to France and started translating books from French into English. In 1787, she published The Romance of Real Life, which were translated stories about court trials. She had to withdraw another translation, Manon Lescaut, because people said it was wrong and copied from someone else.
In 1785, the family returned to England. Charlotte's relationship with her husband did not get better. On April 15, 1787, she left him after 22 years of marriage. She wrote that his temper was "so cruel" that her "life was not safe." When Charlotte left Benjamin, she didn't get a legal agreement to protect her earnings. Under English law, her husband could still access her money. Charlotte knew her children's future depended on getting the money from her father-in-law's will. So, she worked hard to earn enough money to pay for the lawsuit and keep her family's good name.
Charlotte Smith proudly called herself a "gentlewoman." She signed her books "Charlotte Smith of Bignor Park." All her books were published under her own name, which was a brave choice for a woman at that time. Her success as a poet allowed her to do this. She always saw herself as a poet. Even though she wrote more novels and they brought her more money, she believed poetry would bring her respect. She felt her poems showed her private sorrows to the public.
After leaving her husband, Charlotte moved near Chichester. She decided to write novels because they made more money than poetry. Her first novel, Emmeline (1788), was a big success. It sold 1500 copies in just a few months. She wrote nine more novels in the next ten years. These included Ethelinde (1789), Celestina (1791), Desmond (1792), and The Old Manor House (1793).
Charlotte Smith started her novel-writing career when people expected women's books to be about romance. They usually featured a good heroine who faced many problems until a hero saved her. While Smith's novels used this structure, they also included ideas about politics. She supported the French Revolution through her male characters. Sometimes, she changed the typical romance story by showing women's desires or women suffering from unfair power. Her novels helped develop Gothic fiction and novels that focused on feelings.
Smith's novels often included characters and events from her own life. For example, Mr. and Mrs. Stafford in Emmeline were based on Charlotte and Benjamin. She faced a lot of sadness in her life. Her mother died when Charlotte was three. Charlotte's own first child died soon after her second child was born, and that child only lived ten years. The introductions to Smith's novels told about her own struggles, including the deaths of several of her children. She openly mourned her daughter Anna Augusta, who died at age twenty in 1795. Smith's introductions showed her as a suffering heroine and a strong critic of laws that kept her and her children poor.
Charlotte's experiences made her argue for legal changes that would give women more rights. She made these arguments in her novels. At first, readers liked her ideas. But as years passed, readers grew tired of her stories of struggle. Some people, like the poet Anna Seward, even called Smith "vain" for talking about her husband in public.
Charlotte Smith moved often because of money problems and her health. In the last 20 years of her life, she lived in many different towns. She finally settled in Tilford, Surrey.
Smith became involved with English radicals in the early 1790s. Like them, she supported the French Revolution and its ideas of a republic. Her novel Desmond tells the story of a man who travels to revolutionary France. He believes the revolution is right and that England should also change. The novel was published in June 1792, before France and Britain went to war. It was also before the "Reign of Terror" in France, which shocked the public and turned them against the revolutionaries. Like many radicals, Smith criticized the French later, but she still believed in the original ideas of the revolution.
To support her family, Smith had to sell her books. So, she had to make her political ideas less obvious in her later works. She set her next novel, The Old Manor House (1793), during the American Revolutionary War. This allowed her to talk about democratic changes without directly mentioning the French situation. However, her last novel, The Young Philosopher (1798), was a final book with strong radical ideas. In it, her main character leaves Britain for a more hopeful America.
The Old Manor House is often considered Smith's best novel. It has emotional themes and well-developed minor characters. Famous writers like Walter Scott and Anna Laetitia Barbauld praised it. As a successful writer, Smith talked with many famous artists and thinkers of her time. These included the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the novelist Mary Hays. Many magazines reviewed her works.
Charlotte Smith earned the most money between 1787 and 1798. After that, she was not as popular. This might have been because the quality of her work changed after so many years of writing. Also, she published a new book almost every year for 22 years, so readers might have lost interest. There was also controversy because she wrote about the French Revolution. Both radical and conservative magazines criticized her novels about the revolution. Her constant pursuit of the lawsuit over her father-in-law's inheritance also made some supporters leave her. Her increasingly direct introductions to her books made her less appealing.
To keep earning money, Smith started writing in less political styles. She wrote a collection of stories, Letters of a Solitary Wanderer (1801–1802). Her most successful new area was children's books. These included Rural Walks (1795), Rambles Farther (1796), Minor Morals (1798), and Conversations Introducing Poetry (1804). She also wrote two history books about England (1806) and A Natural History of Birds (1807), which was published after she died. Her return to poetry, Beachy Head and Other Poems (1807), also came out after her death. However, publishers paid less for these books. By 1803, Charlotte Smith was very poor. She could barely afford food or heating. She even sold her beloved library of 500 books to pay off debts. She worried about being sent to jail for the remaining money she owed.
Illness and Death
Charlotte Smith suffered from gout (likely rheumatoid arthritis) for many years. This made it very hard and painful for her to write. By the end of her life, she was almost paralyzed. She wrote to a friend that she felt like a "cauliflower" because she could barely move. On February 23, 1806, her husband died in a debtor's prison. Smith finally received some money he owed her, but she was too sick to do anything with it. She died a few months later, on October 28, 1806, at Tilford. She was buried at Stoke Church, near Guildford. The lawsuit over her father-in-law's estate was finally settled seven years later, in 1813, more than 36 years after his death.
Friends and Fellow Writers
Charlotte Smith's novels were read and reviewed by her writer friends. She would do the same for them, as they found it helpful to improve each other's work. Ann Radcliffe, who also wrote Gothic fiction, was one of these friends. While she received praise, Smith also faced criticism from other writers. For example, Jane Austen made fun of Smith's novels but actually used ideas for plots, characters, and events from them.
Robert Southey, a poet and early Romantic writer, understood Smith's difficulties. He said that even though she wrote more and better than other women writers, it wasn't her only job. She wasn't just trying to show off. Besides Jane Austen, Henrietta O'Neill and Reverend Joseph Cooper Walker were trusted friends of Smith. Henrietta O'Neill helped Smith connect with fashionable literary circles.
Reverend Joseph Cooper Walker, a writer from Dublin, was one of Smith's longest friends and mentors. He helped her with her publishers in Dublin. Smith openly shared her writing and family matters with him. Letters she sent to her close friend, Sarah Rose, show a more positive and joyful side of Smith. Another friend, William Hayley, was well-liked and influential in their time. However, Hayley stopped supporting Smith in 1794. Smith felt betrayed by his actions. Even with her success and a few good friends, Smith felt "sadly isolated" from other writers.
Her Lasting Impact
Charlotte Smith is seen as the "first poet in England whom we would call Romantic." She helped shape the ideas and writing styles of that time. She was also responsible for bringing the sonnet form back to life in England. She influenced famous Romantic poets like William Wordsworth and John Keats. Wordsworth said that Smith wrote "with true feeling for rural nature." He also said that English poetry owed a lot to her. However, by the mid-1800s, Smith was mostly forgotten.
Smith was also respected for her ten novels. She wrote in many different styles, including Gothic, revolutionary, educational, and emotional novels. She was known as one of the most popular poets of her time. Henry James Pye said Smith was excellent at both novels and sonnets, showing her ability to charm readers and stir their emotions.
Smith aimed to write as well as famous writers like Anna Laetitia Barbauld and Francis Ysidro Edgeworth. The inspiration she got from these writers helped her gain an audience. Smith was known for sharing her personal and emotional struggles. She also talked about the stress of meeting deadlines, sending in her books, and getting paid. She was good at convincing her publishers to work with her problems. Smith would give her final drafts in exchange for "food, lodging, and expenses for her children."
Smith "held onto her own sense of herself as a gentlewoman of integrity." Some publishers saw her complaints about the publishing process as self-pity. This affected her relationships and reputation with them. But Smith's determination to be taken seriously and her strong use of emotion show her importance in the "Age of Sensibility." Her work is described as being about kindness, generosity to those less fortunate, and sympathy for those who suffered.
Overall, Charlotte Smith's writing career was celebrated and popular until her later years. She is now seen as a very important writer of her time, just as important as the male Romantic poets.
Smith's novels became popular again at the end of the 20th century. Critics interested in women writers, Gothic novels, and historical novels recognized her importance. They agreed that she helped bring back the English sonnet. Walter Scott wrote that she "preserves in her landscapes the truth and precision of a painter." Anna Barbauld said Smith was the first to include detailed descriptions of nature in novels. In 2008, all of Smith's prose works became available to the public. This included all her novels, children's stories, and rural walks.
Selected Works
Poetry
- Elegiac Sonnets (1784)
- "On Being Cautioned Against Walking on an Headland" (1797)
- The Emigrants (1793)
- Written on a port on a dark evening (1800)
- Beachy Head and Other Poems (1807)
Novels
- Emmeline; or The Orphan of the Castle (1788)
- Ethelinde; or the Recluse of the Lake (1789)
- Celestina (1791)
- Desmond (1792)
- The Old Manor House (1793)
- The Wanderings of Warwick (1794)
- The Banished Man (1794)
- Montalbert (1795)
- Marchmont (1796)
- The Young Philosopher (1798)
Educational Works
- Rural Walks (1795)
- Rambles Farther (1796)
- Minor Morals (1798)
- Letters Of A Solitary Wanderer (1800)
- Conversations Introducing Poetry (1804)
