Charlotte Smith

Montalbert (Dodo Press) Charlotte Smith

Charlotte Turner Smith (1749-1806) was an English poet and novelist whose works have been credited with influencing Jane Austen, William Wordsworth and particularly Charles Dickens. She was both a poet and an author whose works fall under the Romantic genre. Smith was interested in social conditions as well as politics, with specific interest in the French Revolution. She put down her thoughts in the form of sonnets, helping to initiate a revival of the form which had been out of fashion since the mid-1600s. Her poetry, famous for its melancholy and sadness, became highly popular in the following years. In the late 1780s Charlotte Turner Smith began to write novels to earn money for her family. Emmeline appeared in 1788, Ethelinde in 1789, then followed Celestina (1791), Desmond (1792) and The Old Manor House (1793), her most famous work. Amongst her other works are Elegiac Sonnets (1784), The Emigrants (1793), The Banished Man (1794), Montalbert (1795) and Conversations Introducing Poetry (1804).