Charlotte Smith

1749 - 1806

Charlotte Smith was married at 15 and had 12 kids (3 of which died soon after birth) before she divorced her husband, Benjamin Smith. She wrote in order to make money while her husband was in prinson in 1783.

Smith was a novelist, beginning in 1788, but eventually focused on Sonnets, influencing the likes of Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, and Coleridge. Smith used the sonnet as a way of interpreting a melancholy type of feeling, and as time passed, others followed suit.

Coleridge stated in his 1796 essay on the sonnet that Smith's sonnets "... appear to me the most exquisite, in which moral Sentiments, Affections, or Feelings, are deduced from, and associated with, the scenery of Nature." Nature eventually became a large part of Romantic literature, and eventually worked its way into the genre now known as "the greater Romantic lyric."


Winnie Jaing - TA: Amanda Waldo - Discussion 1H