Charlotte smith biography poet series

Charlotte Smith was an eighteenth-century poet and novelist, born to a wealthy father who owned two estates, and went on to marry into a wealthy family. While one might imagine her economic and social prospects to be good, Smith in fact struggled seriously with poverty throughout her life, and was completely destitute by the time of her death.

Further, her status as an unmarried widow for most of her life, and a single mother of nine children The Poetry Archive , makes her success as a published author of poetry and novels all the more unusual. Indeed, her experience is an interesting look at how status can be subverted, even within the rigid class structure of Enlightenment England.

When Charlotte was only a few years old, however, her mother died, and her father abandoned the family, leaving Charlotte and her two siblings to be raised by their maternal aunt, Lucy Towers Zimmerman. Now finding themselves poor and having to sell off their estates, Nicholas was determined to marry Charlotte off to a wealthy family Blank.

This was enough for Nicholas, who promptly married off the year-old Charlotte to the year-old suitor in Benjamin failed to maintain his duties to the family business, leaving Charlotte to take on the bulk of the work, including once successfully writing a legal vindication of her father-in-law Richard against a libel suit that had been brought against him Zimmerman.

Charlotte and her husband produced a total of eleven children, of whom the first two died within their first few years, and only six managed to outlive her.

Charlotte smith children

Her constant familial tragedy coloured her work, and her writing was known to be remarkably sorrowful among her literary contemporaries. Eventually, Benjamin too found himself in debt, and he and Charlotte spent seven months in prison on account of it. Elegiac Sonnets was published in