Charlotte Smith

Charlotte Smith (born May 4, 1749, London, Eng.—died Oct. 28, 1806, Tilford, near Farnham, Surrey) was an English novelist and poet, highly praised by the novelist Sir Walter Scott. Her poetic attitude toward nature was reminiscent of William Cowper’s in celebrating the “ordinary” pleasures of the English countryside. Her radical attitudes toward conventional morality (the novel Desmond tells of the innocent love of a man for a married woman) and political ideas of class equality (inspired by the French Revolution) gained her notoriety, but her work belongs essentially with that of the derivative 18th-century romantic tradition of women novelists.

Smith’s husband fled to France to escape his creditors. She joined him there, until, thanks largely to her, he was able to return to England. In 1787, however, she left him and began writing to support her 12 children. Elegiac Sonnets and Other Essays, which she had published in 1784, had been well received, but because novels promised greater financial rewards, she wrote, after some free translations of French novels, Emmeline; or, The Orphan of the Castle (1788) and Ethelinde; or, The Recluse of the Lake (1789). Desmond appeared in 1792 and was followed by her best work, The Old Manor-House (1793). Toward the end of her life, she turned to writing instructive books for children, the best being Conversations Introducing Poetry for the Use of Children (1804).