Biography Charlotte Smith

Poet Biography

According to some critics, Charlotte Turner Smith, "was the first poet in England whom in retrospect we would call Romantic" (Curran, Intro, The Poems of Charlotte Smith).

The first edition of her Elegiac Sonnets, written in 1783 while she was in debtor's prison with her husband and children, brought her sudden fame.

Her most direct beneficiary among the canonical male poets was William Wordsworth who says in an essay that Smith was a poet "to whom English verse is under greater obligations than are likely to be either acknowledged or remembered" (The Prose Works of William Wordsworth: Critical and Ethical, Vo III).

Smith, as with many other women writers of the period, was largely forgotten by the second half of the nineteenth century.