Publisher Description
Charlotte Smith was one of England's first Romantic poets. Among other legacies, her Elegiac Sonnets, an instant success, helped revive the English sonnet, and her novels—of which she wrote ten—helped form genre conventions for the gothic novel. Popular and prolific in her lifetime, she faded into obscurity after her death; only in recent history has her unique talent and influence been widely celebrated once again.
Collected here is a sample of Smith's masterful poetry. Melancholic, infused with a reverence for the natural world, and critical of the period's patriarchy, these are the words of a woman who William Wordsworth described as a poet "to whom English verse is under greater obligations than are likely to be either acknowledged or remembered."
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About Charlotte Smith
Charlotte Turner Smith (1749-1806) was born in London to a wealthy family.
Unfortunately, her father’s reckless spending forced her into an early, unhappy
marriage with Benjamin Smith, an abusive gambler who was completely unsupportive
of her writing, in which she had begun to immerse herself. Though her novels,
and particularly her poetry, received critical acclaimed, her life was one of
general unhappiness—a constant battle against dwindling finances, attempts to
separate herself from a violent, reckless husband, and losing much of her
inheritance to a nearly-forty year long legal battle that became the
inspiration for Dickens’ central case in Bleak
House. By 1803, Smith was again poverty-stricken with severe gout; the disease
made writing painful and later almost paralyzed her. On February 23, 1806,
Charlotte finally received some of her inheritance, but was too ill to do
anything with it, and she died on October 28, 1806.
About Ghizela Rowe
Ghizela Rowe has worked in broadcast
television for thirty years on a broad range of programming. Her specialization
is in music. She helps run the Copyright Group, an extensive collection of
master recording rights, and has lent her voice to many audiobooks, including The Poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning,
Elizabeth Gaskell: The Short Stories, and The Romantics: An Introduction.