Charlotte Smith

Charlotte Turner Smith (1749-1806) was born into the landed gentry and married off at 15, on the insistence of a hostile stepmother, to a wastrel from a West Indian family whose money came from the slave trade. When her husband's fecklessness forced her to support herself and their nine surviving children alone, she at once became a celebrated poet and novelist. Writing at the time of the French Revolution, she wanted change in England too and commented sharply on the injustice of England's class system, on the legalized looting of Empire and the legal prostitution of arranged marriages. Her Elegiac Sonnets with their lonely landscapes greatly influenced William Wordsworth, while Jane Austen devoured her satirical fiction and adapted her plots and settings for novels of her own. Her personality comes across vividly from her letters, published here for the first time, and from Loraine Fletcher's sympathetic, scholarly narrative.

First sentence: On a cold evening in October 1784, Charlotte Smith was waiting at the embarkation point near the Ship Inn at Brighton to board the packet to Dieppe.

Year

1998

Language

English

Publisher

Palgrave Macmillan

Editions

4

Pages

413

ISBN

9780333949467

Data source: Wikidata