Smith, Charlotte

(1749-1806)

   The daughter of Nicholas Turner of Stoke House, Surrey, and Bignor Park, Sussex, her mother died when she was three, and when her father remarried, Charlotte's aunt arranged for her to marry Benjamin Smith, son of Richard Smith, a West India merchant and director of the East India Company. On the death of his wife, her father-in-law married Charlotte's aunt. In 1782, following his father's compliSmith cated will and lawsuit, the Hampshire estate was sold and Smith was imprisoned for debt and for seven months Charlotte shared his confinement. The couple lived for a time in France, but Charlotte separated from her husband about 1786 and returned to England. To support herself and her twelve children, she took up writing. Between 1788 and 1798 she wrote eleven novels. She died at Tilford, near Farnham, Surrey, and was buried at Stoke Church, near Guildford. In 1784 she published Elegiac Sonnets and Other Essays. Some of her poems: "Apostrophe to an Old Tree," "Ode to the Missel Thrush," "The Close of Summer," "The Dictatorial Owl," "The Emigrants," "The Forest Boy," "The GlowWorm," "To a Nightingale."

   Sources: Dictionary of National Biography. Electronic Edition 1.1. Oxford University Press, 1997. English Poetry: Author Search. Chadwyck-Healey Ltd., 1995 (http://www.lib.utexas.edu:8080/search/epoetry/author.html). Fellow Mortals: An Anthology of Animal Verse. Roy Fuller, ed. Macdonald and Evans, 1981. Poetry by English Women: Elizabethan to Victorian, R.E. Pritchard, ed. Continuum, 1990. The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry. 11th ed. The Columbia Granger's World of Poetry, Columbia University Press, 2005 (http://www.columbiagrangers.org). The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th edition. Margaret Drabble, ed. Oxford University Press, 2000. The Poems of Charlotte Smith. Stuart Curran, ed. Oxford University Press, 1993.