The Poems of Charlotte Smith (Women Writers in English 1350-1850) - Softcover

In the best of her sonnets and shorter poems, Smith manages to combine an intense, personal note of melancholy with keen and sensitive observation of the natural world...Intelligently introduced, usefully annotated, and with textual notes giving variants, The Poems of Charlotte Smith will be welcomed both by scholars working on women's writing of the period and by teachers and students who are, increasingly, demanding alternatives to an exclusively male canonical tradition. (RES New Series XLVII 185)

This edition should be regarded as a starting point not only for a more detailed and comprehensive examination of Smith's poetry, but also for an exploration of the numerous ways in which these poems intersect and interact with other elements in Romantic literary culture. (David Duff, Romanticism)

Charlotte Smith's life was the stuff of romantic anguish; upon marriage she felt exiled in "personal slavery", and began publishing poems to earn money while in debtor's prison with her extravagant husband. They subsequently resided in France and lived on subscriptions to her poems and translation work, but she eventually left her husband, "fearing my life was not safe", and began publishing novels annually in order to provide for her children.
Smith was the first English poet whom, in retrospect, we could call Romantic, and was particularly influential on Wordsworth's style and ideas. Her poetry, beginning with the first edition of Elegaic Sonnets in 1784, was well received by her contemporaries; her final masterpiece, Beachy Head, published posthumously in 1807, powerfully illustrates the impulse to resolve the self into nature. Today, Smith is known primarily as a novelist (her previously un-reprinted novel, The Banished Man, will appear in the series), but this volume will be the first complete collection of her poems. It promises to revolutionize our ideas about the development of English Romanticism.
This unprecedented new series reintroduces women's writings of cultural and literary interest, from the Medieval period through the early nineteenth century, often for the first time since their original publication. Derived from the Brown University Women Writers Project, the series unearths a wide range of neglected gems, dispelling the myth that women wrote little of real value before the Victorian period. Each volume includes an introduction putting the work in its historical and literary context and helpful explanatory notes.