Charlotte Turner Smith

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Charlotte Turner Smith drawn by George Romney

Charlotte Turner Smith (born May 4, 1749 in London , † October 28, 1806 in Tilford ) was an English writer, poet and translator of French prose.

Life

Charlotte Smith was the eldest daughter of the wealthy Nicholas Turner and his wife Anna Towers. After their mother's premature death, Charlotte and her sister grew up with an aunt and attended schools in Chichester and Kensington. At the age of 15, Charlotte married the twenty-one year old Benjamin Smith, son of the wealthy businessman and director of the East India Company Richard Smith. The young couple initially lived in their parents' home in London, but soon after family tensions they moved with the children to Lys Farm , Hampshire . Serious inheritance disputes after the death of Richard Smith in 1776 (he had not clearly enough financially secure his grandchildren) would burden Charlotte and Benjamin for life. A life of extravagance and an inability to adequately manage his paternal inheritance resulted in Benjamin Smith imprisoned for seven months in 1783.

In 1782 and in May 1784, shortly before the release of her husband, some of Charlotte's poems were published (sonnets in European Magazine and the collection Elegiac Sonnets, and Other Essays , which William Hayley, a neighbor of the Turner, made publication possible). The descriptions of nature in her sonnet poem , which were interwoven with mystical melancholy, were particularly well received by the readership (The Elegiac Poems were repeatedly published in the following years). The family lived in Dieppe from the mid-1980s , presumably to escape the creditors. Charlotte translated Antoine-François Prévosts Manon Lescaut (1785) and a year later published The Romance of Real Life , based on French court records.

Back in England, the Smiths lived with their children temporarily near Midhurst , Sussex . In 1787 Charlotte separated from her selfish and indebted husband, who withdrew to Scotland. The extended edition of their Elegiac Sonnets (1789) already had over 800 subscribers; later, in 1796, Samuel Taylor Coleridge emphasized the importance of Charlotte Smith for the genre of the sonnet. Since she and her children could not support herself and her children by poetry alone, Charlotte published a whole series of novels that met the taste of the time, including Emmeline; or The Orphan of the Castle (4 vols, 1788) or Desmond (3 vols, 1792). Her financial problems, however, could not be resolved, nor the demands of the asset managers of her father-in-law - even if Charlotte won the legal battle shortly before her death at least for her children.

Charlotte Smith died in Tilford , Surrey , October 28, 1806 , eight months after her husband passed away in Berwick Prison. The Beachy Head collection appeared posthumously ; With Other Poems (1807).

Works

  • Elegiac Sonnets (1784)
  • The Romance of Real Life (1786)
  • Emmeline; or The Orphan of the Castle (Roman, 1788)
  • Ethelinde; or the Recluse of the Lake (Roman, 1789)
  • Celestina (novel, 1791)
  • Desmond (novel, 1792)
  • The Emigrants (poems, 1793)
  • The Old Manor House (Roman, 1793)
  • The Wanderings of Warwick (novel, 1794)
  • The Banished Man (novel, 1794)
  • Montalbert (novel, 1795)
  • Marchmont (novel, 1796)
  • The Young Philosopher (novel, 1798)
  • Beachy Head; With Other Poems (poems, 1807, posthumous)

The novels Celestina , Desmond and Marchmont were translated into German by Meta Forkel-Liebeskind in the 1790s .

literature

  • Diana Bowstead: Charlotte Smith's Desmond: The Epistolary Novel as Ideological Argument. In: Mary Anne Schofield, Cecelia Macheski: Fetter'd or Free? British Women Novelists, 1670-1815. Ohio University Press, Athens 1986, pp. 237-263.
  • Bishop C. Hunt, Jr .: Wordsworth and Charlotte Smith. In: Wordsworth Circle , 1 (Summer 1970), pp. 85-113.
  • George W. Whiting: Charlotte Smith, Keats, and the Nightingale. In: Keats-Shelley Journal , 12 (Winter 1963), pp. 4-8.
  • Smith, Charlotte . In: Encyclopædia Britannica . 11th edition. tape 25 : Shuválov - Subliminal Self . London 1911, p. 259 (English, full text [ Wikisource ]).

Web links

Wikisource: Charlotte Turner Smith  - Sources and full texts (English)
personal data
SURNAME Smith, Charlotte Turner
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English writer, poet and translator
DATE OF BIRTH May 4, 1749
PLACE OF BIRTH London
DATE OF DEATH October 28, 1806
Place of death Tilford , Surrey