Following the research I conducted for the recitation, I discovered Charlotte Turner Smith, known for her involvement in reviving the English sonnet and setting up traditions of gothic fiction. Typically, in curriculums that encompass the Romantic period, prominent figures like Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, and Wordsworth are discussed and reviewed. In a male dominated period, the women of the Romantics were often forgotten, disregarded, or just not as highlighted as their male counterparts. With that being said, I think Smith deserves a nomination for the class’s anthology because her work precedes that of the perceived key figures of the Romantic period and thus she has set the stage for them without getting the recognition. She fell into the resurgence role with her 1783 Elegiac Sonnets that she composed in prison. Most notably, she voluntary moved into the prison with her husband Benjamin Smith, who illegally spent a portion of his father’s legacy from slavery. Benjamin escaped prison and fled to France with Charlotte following him. The couple later divorced in England because Benjamin was abusive. There were issues with the inheritance from Benjamin’s father and so Charlotte lived an unstable life with her children (of 6, only 1 survived her). In her later works, Charlotte wrote many romantic novels that incorporated support for the French Revolution, female narratives of desire and autocracy, gothic elements, and sensibility. Although her poetry work is limited, the pieces that exist give a glimpse of what her longer discourse is like. Wordsworth too advocated for Charlotte in his Critical Opinions piece:

“Charlotte Smith: a lady to whom English verse is under greater obligations than are likely to be either acknowledged or remembered. She wrote little, and that little unambitiously, but with true feeling for rural nature, at a time when nature was not much regarded by English Poets; for in point of time her earliest writings preceded, I believe, those of Cowper and Burns.”

Recommended readings

• On being Cautioned against Walking on a Headland (1783). http://www.poetrybyheart.org.uk/poems/on-being-cautioned-against-walking-on-a-headland-sonnet/. Personal favorite!

• Beachy Head ( ). https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/beachy-head/

• Written Near a Port on a Dark Evening ().https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/written-near-a-port-on-a-dark-evening/.

• The Night-Flood Rakes (). https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/sonnet-lxvi-the-night-flood-rakes/

References

Brewer, Emily Marie. A Lady Novelist and the Late Eighteenth-Century Book Trade: Charlotte Smith's Letters to Publisher Thomas Cadell, Sr., 1786-94. Dissertation. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 2013.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. (2019, October 24). Charlotte Smith. Retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/biography/Charlotte-Smith

Wordsworth, W., & Peacock , M. (1950). The Critical Opinions of William Wordsworth (1835). The Johns Hopkins University Press