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Chapter Eight: The Sonnet, Charlotte Smith, and What Women Wrote
- Johns Hopkins University Press
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c h a p t e r e i g h t The Sonnet, Charlotte Smith, and What Women Wrote A grandeur, grace and spirit, all their own. — a n n a s e w a r d Scorn Not the Sonnet, London, 1802, Nuns Fret Not—among William Wordsworth ’s nearly five hundred sonnets are these three incomparable ones on the form itself. The grounds for them were laid in the eighteenth-century sonnet revival, and women were major participants in it. In the last few years women’s contributions have received justified attention, but they are still far from being understood in any refined or detailed way. By 1802 the opinion of the Critical Review that ‘‘the sonnet has been revived by Charlotte Smith’’ was accepted,∞ yet even Smith’s work is incompletely understood. Stuart Curran and others have argued that the revival of the sonnet was as much a ‘‘genuine artistic movement’’ as the experimentation with the sonnet in England in the Renaissance and that the revival was the period in which the sonnet became a great English and major poetic form.≤ Women were among the earliest eighteenth-century experimenters and scholars of the form, and by the end of the century the contributions and achievements of women, including Anna Seward, Mary Robinson, and Helen Maria Williams, had set the stage for what Marlon Ross and others have said was a need for men to reclaim the sonnet.≥ Today, beside the slim output and mediocrity of the other revivalists (Thomas Edwards, Thomas Warton) Charlotte Smith seems a giant. In 1784 she published The Sonnet, Charlotte Smith, and What Women Wrote 317 Elegiac Sonnets and Other Essays, and that mood and the form seemed especially congenial for her.∂ Smith let sensibility, the picturesque ode, and somber tones flow into her sonnets and impressively compressed them, thereby reinventing the sonnet and extending its purposes. Without question, she was a major contributor to the revival and is the poet associated with the rebirth of the sonnet as a popular form.∑ I begin by placing Smith within an expanded literary history of the sonnet and argue, in the second section, that she published the first of several important sonnet sequences written by women at the end of the century. The third section describes women’s active engagement with the sonnet and one another’s work. I conclude the chapter with a study of Smith’s other major poetry and her importance as a transitional poet. The sonnet is, of course, one of the four major forms at the end of the century to which women made major contributions, especially as they became distinctively English. This chapter on the sonnet therefore continues the plan of this book to look at the major forms in which women wrote and must, with the chapter on the elegy, serve to suggest what I might have done with the ode and the metrical tale. Charlotte Smith, like the poets discussed in earlier chapters, is also an entrée into an understanding of the kinds of poetry women were writing and of their conceptions of poetry’s uses within the culture. As in other chapters, the work of other women is painted into a revised, more complex and subtle literary history. Now recognized as the best woman poet of the last part of the century, as Finch is for the first, Smith also provides the means to understanding what the life of a woman poet could now be. A comparison of her with Finch and Egerton give us a sense of the changing status of women and of women poets in society. Above all, perhaps, Smith is eloquent testimony to the problems that arise from identifying a poet by one type of poem. The Sonnet and the Political Smith’s first book, an elegant edition of nineteen sonnets with a genteel title, Elegiac Sonnets, and Other Essays by Charlotte Smith of Bignor Park in Sussex, was published in 1784, while she was living in King’s Bench Prison with her debtor husband. There would be nine editions of Elegiac Sonnets in her lifetime, several (the third, fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth) with additional poems, and each was praised by the literary world and appreciated by the public. In 1797 the eighth edition became two volumes, and twelve more poems were added to the second volume in the 1800 edition. No one would have predicted such success for Elegiac Sonnets. In the seven- [44.195.47...