Charlotte Turner Smith

Charlotte Smith (née Turner; – ) was an English novelist and poet of the School of Sensibility whose Elegiac Sonnets (1784) contributed to the revival of the form in England. She also helped to set conventions for Gothic fiction and wrote political novels of sensibility. Despite ten novels, four children's books and other works, she saw herself mainly as a poet and expected to be remembered for that. Smith left her husband and began writing to support their children. Her struggles for legal independence as a woman affect her poetry, novels and autobiographical prefaces. She is credited with turning the sonnet into an expression of woeful sentiment and her early novels show development in sentimentality. Later novels such as Desmond and The Old Manor House praised the ideals of the French Revolution. Waning interest left her destitute by 1803. Barely able to hold a pen, she sold her book collection to pay debts and died in 1806. Largely forgotten by the mid-19th century, she has since been seen as a major Romantic precursor. Early life Charlotte Turner was born on 4 May 1749 in London and baptised on 12 June as the oldest child of well-to-do Nicholas Turner and Anna Towers. Her two siblings, Nicholas and Catherine Ann, were born over the next five years. Smith received a typical girl's education in a wealthy, late 18th-century family. Her childhood was marked by her mother's early death (probably giving birth to Catherine) and her father's reckless spending. 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. At the age of six, Charlotte went to school in Chichester and took drawing lessons from the painter George Smith. 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. She loved to read and wrote poems, which her father encouraged. She even submitted a few to the Lady's Magazine for publication, but they were not accepted.