Charlotte Smith (née Turner; (1749-05-04)4 May 1749 – (1806-10-28)28 October 1806) was an English novelist and poet of the School of Sensibility whose Elegiac Sonnets (1784) contributed to the revival of the form in England.

[4] After losing his wife, Nicholas Turner travelled and the children were raised by Lucy Towers, their maternal aunt; when exactly their father returned is unknown.

Two years later, she, her aunt and her sister moved to London, where she attended a girls' school in Kensington and learned dancing, drawing, music and acting.

[3] She persuaded Richard to set Benjamin up as a gentleman farmer in Hampshire and lived with him from 1774 until 1783 at Lys Farm,[5] Bramdean, about 10 miles east of Winchester.

Smith's sonnets helped initiate a revival of the form and granted an aura of respectability to her later novels, as poetry was then considered the highest art.

[3] Smith's relations with her husband did not improve and on 15 April 1787 she left him after 22 years of marriage, writing that she might "have been contented to reside in the same house with him" had not "his temper been so capricious and often so cruel," so that her "life was not safe".

[4] When Charlotte left Benjamin, she did not secure a legal agreement to protect her profits – he would have access to them under English primogeniture laws.

[3] Smith knew that her children's future rested on a successful settlement of the lawsuit over her father-in-law's will, and so made every effort to earn enough money to fund the suit and retain the family's genteel status.

As Sarah Zimmerman claimed in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, "She prized her verse for the role it gave her as a private woman whose sorrows were submitted only reluctantly to the public.

"[3] After leaving her husband, Smith moved to a town near Chichester and decided to write novels, as they would make more money than poetry.

[4] Although Smith's novels employed this structure, they also included political commentary, notably support of the French Revolution through her male characters.

While a common device at the time, Antje Blank writes in The Literary Encyclopedia, "few exploited fiction's potential of self-representation with such determination as Smith.

According to Zimmerman, "Smith mourned most publicly for her daughter Anna Augusta, who married an émigré... and died aged twenty in 1795.

In the last 20 years of her life, she lived in: Chichester, Brighton, Storrington, Bath, Exmouth, Weymouth, Oxford, London, Frant, and Elstead.

The novel was published in June 1792, a year before France and Britain went to war and before the Reign of Terror began, which shocked the public, turning them against the revolutionaries.

[3] To support her family, Smith had to sell her works, and so was eventually forced, as Blank claims, to "tone down the radicalism that had characterised the authorial voice in Desmond and adopt more oblique techniques to express her libertarian ideals".

[4] She set her next novel, The Old Manor House (1793) in the American War of Independence, which allowed her to discuss democratic reform without directly addressing the French situation.

Her most successful foray was into children's books: Rural Walks (1795), Rambles Farther (1796), Minor Morals (1798), and Conversations Introducing Poetry (1804).

[3] Smith's novels were read and assessed by friends who were also writers, as she would return the favour and they found it beneficial to improve and encourage each other's work.

"[7] John Bennet (1792) wrote that "the little sonnets of Miss Charlotte Smith are soft, pensive, sentimental and pathetic, as a woman's productions should be.

[9] "Charlotte Smith tried not to swim too strongly against the current of public view, because she needed to sell her novels in order to provide for her children.

"[B] In addition to Jane Austen, Henrietta O'Neill, Reverend Joseph Cooper Walker, and Sarah Rose were people Smith saw as trusted friends.

Having become famous for marrying into a great Irish home, Henrietta O'Neill, like Austen, provided Smith "with a poetic, sympathetic friendship and with literary connections,"[7] helping her gain an "entry into a fashionable, literary world to which she otherwise had little access; here she almost certainly met Dr. Moore (author of A View of Society and Manners in Italy and Zeluco) and Lady Londonderry.

Although today his writing is seen as mediocre, William Hayley, another friend of Smith's, was "liked, respected, influential" in their time, especially as he was offered the laureateship on the death of Thomas Warton.

One of the first poets to receive a salary, Henry James Pye claimed Smith was "[excelled] in two species of composition so different as the novel and the sonnet, and whose powers are so equally capable of charming the imagination, and awakening the passions.

Smith was notorious for not only expressing her personal and emotional struggles but also for the anxiety and complications she faced when it came to meeting deadlines, mailing out completed volumes, and payment advancements.

[7] The negative sides that Smith claimed to have experienced during the publication process were perceived as self-pity by many publishers of her time, affecting her relationship and reputation with them.

Her work is defined as "squarely in the cult of sensibility: she believed in the virtue of kindness, in generosity to those less fortunate, and in the cultivation of the finer feelings of sympathy and tenderness for those who suffered needlessly.

"[10] Oneț felt that Smith's work "rejected an identity defined exclusively by emotionality, matrimony, the family unit, and female sexuality."

"Smith deserves to be read not simply as a writer whose work demonstrates changes in taste, but as one of the primary voices of her time and a worthy contemporary of the male romantic poets.