Introduction

Summary

In cheerless solitude, bereft

Of youth and health, thou still art left,

When hope and fortune have deceived me;

Thou, far unlike the summer friend,

Did still my falt'ring steps attend,

And with thy plaintive voice relieved me.

And as the time ere long must come

When I lie silent in the tomb,

Thou wilt preserve these mournful pages;

For gentle minds will love my verse,

And Pity shall my strains rehearse,

And tell my name to distant ages.

When Charlotte Smith died, 202 years ago, her reputation was established as a poet and novelist of sensibility. Keen readers appreciated her sharp politics and her flair with poetic structure; most had enjoyed her semi-Gothic, increasingly real-world plots throughout the 1790s, while her poetry had moved on from establishing the parameters of a Romantic genre to interrogating Romantic form and structure towards the end of her life. As an author, she was a thorough and well-informed businesswoman as well as an innovator and compelling storyteller: her letters show her voluminous correspondence with almost all of her publishers (with the exception of Richard Phillips, who disposed of her letters) and her desire to influence almost every level of the publication process, down to page layout and certainly including payment. Her self-definition as a writer extended to viewing her publishers as her bankers: so thoroughly did she feel a part of their world, she saw nothing unusual in drawing on her publishers not only for advances on money owed or expected to be earned, but also in using them as guarantors for loans and drafts. Although her publishers did not always share her conviction that this was justified behaviour, Smith's letters show her again and again chastising them for letting her down, casting them as ungentlemanly and unreliable, and then backtracking swiftly to regain their confidence and custom. What emerges from the correspondence is Smith's complete self-identification as a writer, which chimes in interesting ways with her readers’ identification of her as an author. Bound up in words and print, the Smith we know today is shaped by what, and how, she wrote.