Smith, Charlotte Turner

Landowner's daughter. She received a typical education for a girl from a wealthy family of the late 18th century. In connection with the early death of her mother, she was brought up in an aunt's family. At the age of 15, she married Benjamin Smith, the son of a wealthy merchant and director of the East India Company, Richard Smith. In marriage, she gave birth to 12 children, of which only six survived. The husband squandered a fortune inherited from his father and part of his wife’s money ended up in a debt prison. After Charlotte paid her husband's debts, the family fled to France, hiding from creditors. In 1785, the family returned to England. Smith’s relationship with her husband did not improve and in April 1787, after twenty-two years of marriage, she left him. In 1806, the ex-husband died in a debt prison, and Smith finally received part of the money she owned.

She suffered from gout for many years. At the end of her life she was almost paralyzed.

She died in 1806.

She made a great contribution to the revival of the English sonnet , the development of Gothic literature and sentimental ladies' novels.

In 1784, she published a collection of Elegiac sonnets. It was influenced by S. Richardson and A. Prevost , whose novel Manon Lesko translated into English .

S. Smith’s novels belong to the family moral genre and are associated with conflicts generated by feudal relations. The first novel, Emmeline, or the Orphan of the castle, v. 1-4, 1788, shows the fate of a thrown child, a victim of cruel aristocrats. In the novel Desmond (Desmond, v. 1-3, 1792), S. Smith advocates the right of a woman to decide her own fate, against violence against a person; while the hero of the novel expresses sympathy for the ideas of the French revolution. In Smith's best novel, The Old Manor House, v. 1-4, 1793, a critical attitude is expressed not only to class prejudices and moral unscrupulousness of the land nobility, but also to the newly emerging bourgeoisie. Some books by S. Smith are autobiographical.

Smith's works, marked by the influence of the Gothic novel and sentimentalism, are characteristic of the final stage of the English Enlightenment.

During her career, S. Smith published ten novels, three collections of poetry, four children's books, and various other works. First of all, S. Smith considered herself a poetess, whose works she considered the most exalted form of literature.

• Elegiac Sonnets (1784)
• The Romance of Real Life (1786)
• Emmeline or The Orphan of the Castle (novel, 1788)
• Ethelinde; or the Recluse of the Lake (novel, 1789)
• Celestina (novel, 1791)
• Desmond (novel, 1792)
• The Emigrants (poems, 1793)
• The Old Manor House (novel, 1793)
• The Wanderings of Warwick (novel, 1794)
• The Banished Man (novel, 1794)
• Montalbert (novel, 1795)
• Marchmont (novel, 1796)
• The Young Philosopher (novel, 1798)
• Beachy Head; With Other Poems (Poems, 1807)

• Charlotte Smith
• Charlotte Smith Works