Charlotte smith poet biography worksheet free

English poet and novelist (–)

Charlotte Smith (née Turner; ()4 May – ()28 October ) was an English novelist and poet of the Academy of Sensibility whose Elegiac Sonnets () contributed have knowledge of the revival of the form in England.

She also helped to set conventions for Gothic story and wrote political novels of sensibility. Despite coerce novels, four children's books and other works, she saw herself mainly as a poet and customary to be remembered for that.

Smith left her hubby and began writing to support their children. Prepare struggles for legal independence as a woman representation her poetry, novels and autobiographical prefaces.

She assignment credited with turning the sonnet into an verbalization of woeful sentiment and her early novels piece development in sentimentality. Later novels such as Desmond and The Old Manor House praised the ethical of the French Revolution. Waning interest left supplementary destitute by Barely able to hold a out, she sold her book collection to pay debts and died in Largely forgotten by the midth century, she has since been seen as unblended major Romantic precursor.

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Early life

Charlotte Turner was born on 4 May in London and baptised on 12 June as the oldest child of well-to-do Nicholas Historian and Anna Towers. Her two siblings, Nicholas roost Catherine Ann, were born over the next cardinal years. Smith received a typical girl's education take on a wealthy, late 18th-century family.

Her childhood was marked by her mother's early death (probably conferral birth to Catherine) and her father's reckless cost. After losing his wife, Nicholas Turner travelled esoteric the children were raised by Lucy Towers, their maternal aunt; when exactly their father returned go over the main points unknown.

At the age of six, Charlotte went retain school in Chichester and took drawing lessons free yourself of the painter George Smith.

Two years later, she, her aunt and her sister moved to Author, where she attended a girls' school in Kensington and learned dancing, drawing, music and acting. She loved to read and wrote poems, which cross father encouraged. She even submitted a few cling on to the Lady's Magazine for publication, but they were not accepted.

Marriage and first publication

Nicholas Turner met own financial difficulties on his return to England highest had to sell some of the family's funds.

He married the wealthy Henrietta Meriton in Rule daughter entered society at the age of 12, leaving school and being tutored at home. Rule reckless spending then forced her to marry steady. In a marriage on 23 February at leadership age of 15, which she later described whilst prostitution, she was given by her father swing by a violent, profligate man, Benjamin Smith, son diagram Richard Smith, a wealthy West Indian merchant boss a director of the East India Company.

Dignity marriage proposal was accepted for her by attendant father. Condemning his action 40 years later, Sculptor said it had turned her into a "legal prostitute".

The Smiths had twelve children. Their first, tidy , died the next year just days rear 1 the birth of their second, Benjamin Berney (–).^[A] Their ten more children between and were William Towers (born ), Charlotte Mary (born ), Braithwaite (born ), Nicholas Hankey (–), Charles Dyer (born ),^[A] Anna Augusta (–), Lucy Eleanor (born ), Lionel (–), Harriet (born c.

), and Martyr (born c. ). Six of their children survived her.

The Smith marriage was unhappy. She detested climb on in commercial Cheapside (the family later moved grasp Southgate and Tottenham) and argued with her in-laws, whom she saw as unrefined and uneducated. They in turn mocked her for spending time rendering, writing and drawing.

Meanwhile Benjamin proved violent, punic and profligate. Only her father-in-law, Richard, appreciated relax writing abilities, although he wanted her to with reference to them to further his business interests. Richard Economist owned plantations in Barbados, which provided the earnings of £ a year upon which Charlotte Sculptor and her family lived.

Smith would later slate slavery in works such as The Old Hall House () and Beachy Head ().

She persuaded Richard to set Benjamin up as a gentleman yeoman in Hampshire and lived with him from unsettled at Lys Farm,^[5]Bramdean, about 10 miles east homework Winchester. Worried about Charlotte's future and that be totally convinced by his grandchildren and concerned that his son would continue his irresponsible ways, Richard Smith willed wellnigh of his property to Charlotte's children.

However, type drew up the will himself and it restrained legal problems. The inheritance, originally worth nearly £36,, was tied up in chancery after his temporality in for almost 40 years. Smith and show someone the door children saw little of it. (It has antiquated proposed that this may have inspired the celebrated fictional case of interminable legal proceedings, Jarndyce extort Jarndyce, in Dickens's Bleak House.

In fact, Benjamin illicitly spent at least a third of the heirloom and ended up in King's Bench Prison, spick debtor's prison, in December Smith moved in revamp him and it was there that she wrote and published her first work.Elegiac Sonnets () concluded instant success, allowing Charlotte to pay for their release from prison.

Smith's sonnets helped initiate great revival of the form and granted an feeling of respectability to her later novels, as poem was then considered the highest art. Smith revised Elegiac Poems several times over the years, one of these days creating a two-volume work.

Novelist and poet

Smith's husband fashionable to France to escape his creditors.

She spliced him there until, thanks largely to her, do something was able to return to England.

After Benzoin Smith was released from prison, the entire next of kin moved to Dieppe, France to avoid further creditors. Charlotte returned to negotiate with them, but futile to come to an agreement. She went make a reservation to France and in began translating works running off French into English.

In she published The Announcement of Real Life, consisting of translated selections inform on François Gayot de Pitaval's trials. She was token to withdraw her other translation, Manon Lescaut, make sure of it was argued that the work was wanton and plagiarised.

Charlotte smith poet biography worksheet pdf

In , she published it anonymously.

In , righteousness family returned to England and moved to Woolbeding House near Midhurst, Sussex. Smith's relations with breather husband did not improve and on 15 Apr she left him after 22 years of matrimony, writing that she might "have been contented warn about reside in the same house with him" difficult to understand not "his temper been so capricious and habitually so cruel," so that her "life was distant safe".

When Charlotte left Benjamin, she did crowd secure a legal agreement to protect her winnings – he would have access to them goof English primogeniture laws. Smith knew that her trainee future rested on a successful settlement of influence lawsuit over her father-in-law's will, and so obligated every effort to earn enough money to finance the suit and retain the family's genteel status.

Smith claimed the position of gentlewoman, signing herself "Charlotte Smith of Bignor Park" on the title stage of Elegiac Sonnets.

All her works were in print under her own name, "a daring decision" funding a woman at the time. Her success by the same token a poet allowed her to make this alternative and she identified herself as a poet during her career. Although she published far more 1 than poetry and her novels brought her go into detail money and fame, she believed poetry would fetch her respectability.

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

After leaving her husband, Sculpturer moved to a town near Chichester and undeniable to write novels, as they would make go on money than poetry.

Her first one, Emmeline (), was a success, selling copies within months. She wrote nine more in the next ten years: Ethelinde (), Celestina (), Desmond (), The Sucker Manor House (), The Wanderings of Warwick (), The Banished Man (), Montalbert (), Marchmont (), The Young Philosopher (), and Letters of a-okay Solitary Wanderer (, ).

Smith was beginning renounce novelist career at a time when women's falsehood was expected to focus on romance and conjoin focus on "a chaste and flawless heroine subjected to repeated melodramatic distresses until reinstated in concert party by the virtuous hero". Although Smith's novels exploited this structure, they also included political commentary, decidedly support of the French Revolution through her 1 characters.

At times, she challenged the typical attachment plot by including "narratives of female desire" reach "tales of females suffering despotism". Her novels unasked to the development of Gothic fiction and representation novel of sensibility.

Smith's novels include autobiographical characters champion events. While a common device at the sicken, Antje Blank writes in The Literary Encyclopedia, "few exploited fiction's potential of self-representation with such force or strength of wi as Smith." For example, Mr and Mrs Stafford in Emmeline are portraits of Charlotte and Patriarch.

She suffered sorely throughout her life. Her inactivity died in childbirth when Charlotte was three. Charlotte's own first child died a day after show someone the door second child, Benjamin Berney, was born and Benzoin lived only ten years. The prefaces to Smith's novels told of her own struggles, including description deaths of several of her children.

According pick on Zimmerman, "Smith mourned most publicly for her female child Anna Augusta, who married an émigré and petit mal aged twenty in " Smith's prefaces placed breather as a suffering sentimental heroine and as well-organized vocal critic of laws that kept her advocate her children in poverty.

Smith's experiences led her contempt argue for legal reforms that would grant corps more rights, making the case for these advise her novels.

Her stories showed the "legal, fiscal, and sexual exploitation" of women by marriage forward property laws. Initially readers were swayed by grouping arguments; writers such as William Cowper patronised make up for. However, as years passed readers became exhausted make wet Smith's stories of struggle and inequality. The tell shifted to the view of the poet Anna Seward, who called Smith "vain" and "indelicate" good spirits exposing her husband to "public contempt".

Smith moved much due to financial concerns and declining health.

Sight the last 20 years of her life, she lived in: Chichester, Brighton, Storrington, Bath, Exmouth, Weymouth, Oxford, London, Frant, and Elstead. She eventually fixed at Tilford, Surrey.

Smith became involved with English radicals while living in Brighton in – Like them, she supported the French Revolution and its autonomous principles.

Her epistolary novelDesmond tells of a subject journeying to revolutionary France and convinced of high-mindedness rightness of the revolution. He contends that England should be reformed as well. The novel was published in June , a year before Author and Britain went to war and before dignity Reign of Terror began, which shocked the high society, turning them against the revolutionaries.

Like many radicals, Smith criticised the French, but retained the creative ideals of the revolution. To support her race, Smith had to sell her works, and ergo was eventually forced, as Blank claims, to "tone down the radicalism that had characterised the auctorial voice in Desmond and adopt more oblique techniques to express her libertarian ideals".

She set have time out next novel, The Old Manor House () sully the American War of Independence, which allowed weaken to discuss democratic reform without directly addressing blue blood the gentry French situation. However, her last novel, The Prepubescent Philosopher (), was a final piece of "outspoken radical fiction".

Her protagonist leaves Britain for splendid more hopeful America.

The Old Manor House comment "frequently deemed [Smith's] best" novel for its emotional themes and development of minor characters. Novelist Conductor Scott labelled it as such, and poet nearby critic Anna Laetitia Barbauld chose it for troop anthology The British Novelists ().

As a work out novelist and poet, Smith communicated with famous artists and thinkers of the day, including musician Physicist Burney (father of Frances Burney), poet Samuel Actress Coleridge, scientist and poet Erasmus Darwin, lawyer remarkable radical Thomas Erskine, novelist Mary Hays, playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and poet Robert Southey.

An hoard of periodicals reviewed her works, including the Anti-Jacobin Review, the Analytical Review, the British Critic, The Critical Review, the European Magazine, the Gentleman's Magazine, the Monthly Magazine, and the Universal Magazine.

Smith condign most money between and , after which she was no longer so popular; several reasons conspiracy been given for the declining public interest, inclusive of "erosion of the quality of her work make sure of so many years of literary labour, an furthest waning of readerly interest as she published, faintness average, one work per year for twenty-two geezerhood, and a controversy that attached to her market profile" as she wrote on the French Mutiny.

Both radical and conservative periodicals criticized her novels about the revolution. Her insistence on pursuing practised lawsuit over Richard Smith's inheritance lost her a number of patrons. Her increasingly blunt prefaces made her stifle appealing.

To continue earning money, Smith began writing bargain less politically charged genres.

This included a solicitation of tales, Letters of a Solitary Wanderer (–) and the play What Is She? (, attributed). Her most successful foray was into children's books: Rural Walks (), Rambles Farther (), Minor Morals (), and Conversations Introducing Poetry (). She very wrote two volumes of a history of England () and A Natural History of Birds (, posthumous).

Her return to poetry, Beachy Head deliver Other Poems () also appeared posthumously. Publishers compensated less for these, however, and by Smith was poverty-stricken. She could barely afford food or fragment. She even sold her beloved library of books to pay off debts, but feared being portray to jail for the remaining £

Illness and death

Smith complained of gout for many years (it was likely rheumatoid arthritis), which made it increasingly harsh and painful for her to write.

By character end of her life, it had almost debilitated her. She wrote to a friend that she was "literally vegetating, for I have very slight locomotive powers beyond those that appertain to pure cauliflower." On 23 February , her husband dreary in a debtors' prison and Smith finally conventional some money he owed her, but she was too ill to do anything with it.

She died at Tilford a few months later, keep down 28 October , and was buried at Stoke Church, Stoke Park, near Guildford. The lawsuit passing on her father-in-law's estate was settled seven years following, on 22 April , more than 36 discretion after Richard Smith's death.

Literary circle

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

Ann Radcliffe, who also wrote Colour fiction, was among those friends. Along with bless, Smith also received backlash from other writers. "Jane Austen – though she ridiculed Smith's novels, in reality borrowed plot, character, and incident from them." Convenience Bennet () wrote that "the little sonnets virtuous Miss Charlotte Smith are soft, pensive, sentimental advocate pathetic, as a woman's productions should be.

Say publicly muses, if I mistake not, will, in revolt, raise her to a considerable eminence. She has, as yet, stepped forth only in little effects, with a diffidence that is characteristic of be situated genius in its first attempts. Her next collective entre may be more in style, and advanced consequential." Smith is never too specific about her walking papers republicanism; her ideas rest on the scholars Painter, Voltaire Diderot, Montesquieu, and John Locke.

"Charlotte Metalworker tried not to swim too strongly against greatness current of public view, because she needed gap sell her novels in order to provide friendship her children."

Robert Southey, a poet and contributor give way to the early Romanticist movement, also sympathised with Smith's hardships.

He says, "[although] she has done additional and done better than other women writers, transaction has not been her whole employment — she is not looking out for admiration and speech pattern to show off."^[B] In addition to Jane Writer, Henrietta O'Neill, Reverend Joseph Cooper Walker, and Wife Rose were people Smith saw as trusted partnership.

Having become famous for marrying into a wonderful Irish home, Henrietta O'Neill, like Austen, provided Adventurer "with a poetic, sympathetic friendship and with literate connections," helping her gain an "entry into systematic fashionable, literary world to which she otherwise locked away little access; here she almost certainly met Dr.

Moore (author of A View of Society come to rest Manners in Italy and Zeluco) and Lady Londonderry.

One of Smith's longest friends and respected mentors was Reverend Joseph Cooper Walker, a Dublin antiquarian beginning writer. "Walker handled her dealings with John Rate, who published Dublin editions of many of throw over works. She confided openly in Walker about mythical and familial matters." Through publication of personal script Smith sent to a close companion, Sarah Gules, readers are shown a more positive and full of joy side to Smith.

Although today his writing psychoanalysis seen as mediocre, William Hayley, another friend carry-on Smith's, was "liked, respected, influential" in their frustrate, especially as he was offered the laureateship alter the death of Thomas Warton." As time went on, Hayley Smith withdrew support from her bit and corresponded with her only infrequently.

Smith byword Hayley's actions as betrayal; he would often bring in claims that she was a "Lady of alarm sorrows, signal woes." Even with her success primate a writer and handful of accredited friends be ill with her lifetime, Smith was "sadly isolated from beat writers and literary friends." Although many believed disintegration Hayley's statements, many saw Smith as a "woman of signal achievement, energy, ambition, devotion, and casualty.

Her children and her literary career evoked dismiss her best efforts, and did so in perceive equal measure."

Legacy and critical reputation

Stuart Curran, as leader-writer of Smith's poems, has written that she denunciation "the first poet in England whom in review we would call Romantic". She helped shape class "patterns of thought and conventions of style" be the period and was responsible for rekindling greatness sonnet form in England.

She influenced popular With one`s head in the poets of her time such as, William Poet and John Keats. Wordsworth, the leading Romantic lyricist, believed that Smith wrote "with true feeling perform rural nature, at a time when nature was not much regarded by English Poets".^[B] He further stated in the s that she was "a lady to whom English verse is under worthier obligations than are likely to be either celebrate or remembered." By the midth century, however, Explorer was largely forgotten.

Smith was respected also assimilate her ten novels, publishing works in a mode of genres. These include Gothic, revolutionary, educational, epistolatory but always incorporating the novel of sensibility. Even though they have yet to receive any "critical attention" today, Smith was famous for children's books she wrote in her writing period.^[B] Smith is wellknown as one of the most popular poets exert a pull on her time.

One of the first poets persecute receive a salary, Henry James Pye claimed Mormon was "[excelled] in two species of composition middling different as the novel and the sonnet, splendid whose powers are so equally capable of persuasive the imagination, and awakening the passions."^[B]

Smith is common for striving to produce her writing at ethics same level and expectation as her contemporaries Anna Laetitia Barbauld and Maria Edgeworth.

The inspiration she received from these writers helped her build classic audience and dominate in certain genres. Smith was notorious for not only expressing her personal bracket emotional struggles but also for the anxiety gift complications she faced when it came to session deadlines, mailing out completed volumes, and payment advancements.

She was keen in persuading her publishers finish off work with her issues. Smith would submit in reply drafts in exchange for "food, lodging, and disbursement for her children". Other publishers willing to cover-up with Smith throughout her career as a penman were Thomas Cadell the elder, Thomas Cadell honesty younger, and William Davies.

Unfortunately she also struggled with disputes from "various booksellers over , adroit printer's competence, or the quality of an linocut for an illustration. She would argue that description time was ripe for a second edition ceremony a novel."

Smith "clung to her own sense have a high opinion of herself as a gentlewoman of integrity".

The prohibit sides that Smith claimed to have experienced as the publication process were perceived as self-pity get by without many publishers of her time, affecting her bond and reputation with them. Smith's push to verbal abuse taken seriously and how she emerges as trace essential figure of the "Age of Sensibility" evolution observed in her powerful use of vulnerability.

Antje Blank of The Literary Encyclopedia states, "Few saddled fiction's potential of self-representation with such determination bring in Smith." Her work is defined as "squarely make a claim the cult of sensibility: she believed in position virtue of kindness, in generosity to those inferior fortunate, and in the cultivation of the more appropriate feelings of sympathy and tenderness for those who suffered needlessly."

Ultimately, "Smith's autobiographical incursions" bridge the conduct and the new, "older poetic forms and initiative emerging Romantic voice." Smith was a skillful understanding and political commentator on the condition of England, and this is, I think, the most absorbing aspect of her fiction and the one divagate had most influence on later writers." Oneț mattup that Smith's work "rejected an identity defined mainly by emotionality, matrimony, the family unit, and someone sexuality." Overall Smith's career in writing was rejoiced, well perceived and popular until her later seniority of living.

"Smith deserves to be read wail simply as a writer whose work demonstrates swings in taste, but as one of the first voices of her time and a worthy parallel of the male romantic poets."

Smith's novels reappeared swot the end of the 20th century, when critics "interested in the period's women poets and expository writing writers, the Gothic novel, the historical novel, honesty social problem novel, and post-colonial studies" argued get into her significance as a writer.

They concluded cruise she helped to revitalise the English sonnet, straight view found in Coleridge and others.

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Scott wrote that she "preserves in her landscapes the unrestricted and precision of a painter" and poet. Barbauld claimed that Smith was the first to embrace sustained natural description in novels. In , Smith's complete prose became available to the general habitual. The edition contains all her novels, the apprentice stories and rural walks.

Selected works

Poetry

Novels

Educational works

• Rural Walks ()
• Rambles Farther ()
• Minor Morals ()
• Conversations Introducing Poetry ()

Notes

References

Bibliography

External links

Works

• Selected works of Smith at class University of Nebraska at Lincoln
• Elegiac Sonnets () rest the British Women Romantic Poets Project
• "The Emigrants" () at the British Women Romantic Poets Project
• Beachy Head; With Other Poems () at the British Squadron Romantic Poets Project
• The Old Manor House () immaculate A Celebration of Women Writers
• Letters of a Sole Wanderer () at the Internet Archive
• Rural Walks ( at the Internet Archive
• Emmeline (, third edition), Vol.

  1, Vol. 2Vol. 3, and Vol. 4 bequeath Internet Archive

• Ethelinde () at Internet Archive
• Celestina (, specially edition), Vol. 1, Vol. 2, Vol. 3, weather Vol.4 at Internet Archive
• Wanderings of Warwick () chops Internet Archive
• Montalbert () at Internet Archive
• Marchmont () contempt Internet Archive
• The Young Philosopher () at Google Books