SOURCE: Hawley, Judith. “Charlotte Smith's Elegiac Sonnets: Losses and Gains.” In Women's Poetry in the Enlightenment: The Making of a Canon, 1730-1820, edited by Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain, pp. 184-98. Houndmills: Macmillan Press Ltd., 1999.

[In the following essay, Hawley discusses Smith's role in the revival of the elegiac sonnet.]

In Chapter 10 of the first volume of Persuasion, Jane Austen's favourite heroine, Anne Elliot, no longer in the spring of her life, finds herself musing on whether or not Captain Wentworth has transferred his affections from her to one of the Misses Musgrove. ‘She occupied her mind as much as possible’ by repeating to herself quotations from ‘some few of the thousand poetical descriptions extant of autumn’.¹ When Wentworth gives a sign of his interest in Louisa Musgrove, Anne's equanimity is disturbed: she ‘could not immediately fall into quotation again. The sweet scenes of Autumn were for a while put by—unless some tender sonnet, fraught with the apt analogy of the declining year, with declining happiness, and the images of youth and hope, and spring, all gone together, blessed her memory’ (p. 83). This generic tender sonnet, which gives an insight into Miss Elliott's inner world and the sentimental vogue of the wider world, may be an allusion to the extremely popular Elegiac Sonnets of Charlotte Smith.² Smith's sonnets abound in comparisons between the recurrence of the seasons and the persistence of her loss. For example “To melancholy” begins conventionally enough, ‘When latest Autumn spreads her evening veil …’ (“Sonnet xxxii,” p. 34). One of her most popular sonnets, “Written at the close of Spring” ends: ‘Another May new buds and flowers shall bring; / Ah! why has happiness—no second Spring?’ (“Sonnet ii”, p. 13) The association between loss and ritual return is fundamental to the move of consolation found in traditional elegies; yet consolation and renewal, as I will argue, are eschewed by Smith in her melancholy sonnets.

The poet and novelist, Charlotte Turner Smith, was a key figure both in the revival of the sonnet form at the end of the eighteenth century, and in the development of the woman's novel in the era of Romanticism and Revolution.³ Born in 1749 into a wealthy family which had extensive estates in Sussex, Smith enjoyed all the educational privileges that a young girl of her class could hope for. When in 1765 she was pushed into marriage with Benjamin Smith, by her father, Nicholas Turner, whose remarriage after the death of Charlotte's mother seems to have made him keen to get his daughter off his hands, she was a talented and promising young lady, not quite 16. By the time she published the first edition of Elegiac Sonnets in 1784, a work which eventually filled two volumes and ran into numerous editions before her death in 1806, she was in severely reduced circumstances.⁴ The profligacy of her husband, and his inability to manage his West Indian business, had driven them both into King's Bench debtors' prison.

Austen's allusion attests to the popularity of Smith's works into the nineteenth century, as well as to her amused fondness for them. The sense of lost promise is entirely appropriate for Anne Elliot at this point in the novel, but she is later to recover her love in a mature reflowering of her relationship with Captain Wentworth. Austen places this melancholy moment here as something that Anne will overcome (and perhaps outgrow); it is a period of painful uncertainty and self-denial which will be rewarded by the return of her lover.

The pattern we find in Persuasion, one of rewarded suffering, of a sacrificial offering which will be blessed and transformed, is close to the traditional structure and economy of the elegy. The formal elegy, alongside which Charlotte Smith's elegiac sonnets should be read, celebrates the dead by at once elevating and transcending them, finding a compensatory substitute for the loved one in the process. Peter Sacks, in his brilliantly subtle and richly suggestive interpretation of the genre, argues that elegies carry out the work of successful mourning:

At the core of each procedure is the renunciatory experience of loss and the acceptance, not just of a substitute, but of the very means and practice of substitution. In each case such an acceptance is the price of survival; and in each case a successful resolution is not merely deprivatory, but offers a form of compensatory reward. The elegist's reward, especially, resembles or augments that of the child—both often involve inherited legacies and consoling identifications with symbolic, even immortal, figures of power.⁵

Sacks connects the poet's relation to the loved one to his relation to past poets, detecting an oedipal struggle for mastery and the right to inherit which is often played out in terms of a mastery over nature. This model of elegy, which equates a ‘healthy’ mourning with the renunciation of the dead, and is deeply entangled with masculine power struggles, has given poets and critics pause. Jahan Ramazani argues that modern poets such as Wilfred Owen and Sylvia Plath refuse to use the dead as stepping stones to power in this way.⁶ Instead, by refusing to participate in the economy of ‘healthy’ mourning, certain modern poets occupy a critical position in their poetry which is akin to ‘melancholia’, the state which Freud designates the opposite of ‘successful’ mourning.⁷ The oedipal model is also problematic when we come to consider gender. While Sacks is confident that a woman's subject position in relation to symbolic codes is ‘not sufficiently different from those of the male to invalidate our discussion's relevance to both genders’ (p. 12), Celeste Schenck disagrees, and argues that women write elegy differently because they relate to both the dead and the living differently.⁸ Her assertion that women eschew competition and maintain a loving connectedness to the dead idealizes the gender, but her criticism of Freudian readings of elegy provides a necessary corrective.

Approaching Smith's elegiac sonnets with this discussion in mind, I think we need to ask about the object of her mourning: what has she lost? What does she hope to gain? The first question is raised in general terms by Freud's difficult question: What does a woman want?—a question which articulates a double (mis)understanding: what does she desire, and what does she lack? If women are culturally emplaced as the gender founded on want, on absence, how can they hope to recover something they never had? This lack relates to both kinds of inheritance discussed by Sacks: the transfer of property after death, and the inheritance of a cultural legacy or poetic voice. Having a weak claim to material ownership and to poetic power, women elegists do not have a direct route to the kinds of transcendence and consolation achieved by the best male elegists. These questions about losses and gains are raised more specifically by Charlotte Smith, because it is not always clear what or whose loss she is mourning. Some of her sonnets are elegies for individuals, for example Burns and Otway, and there are many in volume two which mourn the loss of her favourite daughter, Anna Augusta.⁹ But overall her sonnets are pervaded by a sense of lament, of absence, ‘the pain / Of knowing “such things were”—and are no more’ (“Sonnet xc”, “To oblivion”, p. 77). (Anna Seward dubbed her sonnets ‘everlasting lamentables’.¹⁰) So, what does Smith hope to gain, what substitute, what consolation can elegy provide for her?

Smith's elegies resolutely refuse consolation, and often seem to be trapped in the state of melancholia. There is something apparently pathological about her self-abnegation. In “Sonnet lxvii” she morbidly identifies herself with not just a graveyard but a ruined graveyard (p. 55). Repeatedly she mourns the death of her daughter Anna, and is quite unable to let her go. Furthermore, she denies herself any union with nature, or integration with society, or qualifications as a writer. Her rupture with nature, her alienation from society—‘Alone I wander’ (“Sonnet lxvi”, p. 58)—and her loss of identity as a mother, and her inadequacy as an artist are combined in ‘Reflections on some drawings of plants’, when she argues that, although she can draw pretty pictures of flowers, she cannot keep her favourite daughter, Anna alive in art (“Sonnet xci”, pp. 77-8). In her botanical drawings she can capture in art a nature which might have some reference to herself and her daughter: ‘These bells and golden eyes, embathed in dew’ possibly recall her own eyes bathed in tears. The ‘soft blush that warms the early Rose’ may suggest in some way her young daughter, ‘So early blighted’. But these figures are then repudiated because while Smith can in her painting ‘arrest Spring's humid buds’, she cannot arrest the force which arrested her budding daughter. These frozen living flowers, both artificial and natural, cannot represent her daughter because Smith pictures her to herself as ‘that form adored, / That form, expressive of a soul divine’, a form that hints at the supernatural, and perhaps supernatural because reflexively pictured—‘adored’—by the mother. The correct frame and altar for this image-icon is the mother's ‘bleeding breast’ where she is enshrined by the ‘too faithful’ art of grief, an art which threatens to destroy the mother.

Smith's aesthetic could appear to be entirely negative. She modestly denies that she has any mastery of the sonnet form, ‘shyly’ insisting in the Preface to the first and second editions: ‘The little Poems which are here called Sonnets, have, I believe, no very just claim that title: but they consist of fourteen lines’ (p. 3). She often refuses closure: she ends her sonnet “To oblivion” (“Sonnet xc”, p. 77) with words borrowed from Thomas Warton's ‘Ode I. To Sleep’, reawakening his sense that closure is denied her: “‘Death seems prepared to strike, yet still delays.’” By violating the genre of elegy with her refusal to accept an aesthetic consolation, she places herself outside systems of signification and of value.

Most often, Smith appears to be writing an elegy for herself, for her own lost promise. ‘Not for me / Return those rosy hours which here I used to see!’ she exclaims at the end of “Sonnet xcii”, “Written at Bignor Park in Sussex, in August, 1799” (p. 78), insisting that she is forever cast out from the home of her happy childhood. At the end of “Sonnet lxxxix”, “To the sun”, she exclaims: ‘nought thy rays illumine, now can charm / My misery, or to day convert my night!’ (p. 76)

This state of abjection can be seen as symptomatic of the position of the woman/poet in this period. Stuart Curran considers her to be ‘virtually an archetype of the female condition of the late eighteenth century’.¹¹ Her sensitivity to her alienation and dispossession are existential and typical. It was common in the eighteenth century for women writers to preface their works with humble apologies, insisting that they had no pretensions to literary greatness, they were merely trying to earn a crust for their children. Thus they negotiated entry into the public sphere of print by claiming that their writing was an extension of their maternal role. The role of the mourner (while in some contexts it can function as a protest, a refusal to behave in socially convenient ways) is also not untypical for a woman. In the nineteenth century at least the work of carrying the burden of mourning was performed more by women than by men.

Smith then appears to be a mother-martyr. Indeed the role she has been assigned in literary history—that of midwife to the Romantic sonnet, or even mother of Romanticism—assumes that she laid herself down so that she could be transcended.¹² Poetry, said Wordsworth, owed her a debt which would not be repaid: she is ‘a lady to whom English verse is under greater obligations than are likely to be either acknowledged or remembered’.¹³ Perhaps she becomes the subject of elegy more traditionally conceived: she is the love-object whose literary death can be said to bring about a renewal of nature and the re-energizing of other poets' powers. Her loss is Romanticism's gain.

Yet Smith's perverse refusals also endow her with grace, strength and energy. While she wanders ‘cheerless and unblest’ (“Sonnet lxii,” p. 55) through the ruined landscape of her sonnets, she maintains a self-possession which comes from her dispossession; having lost so much, including the ties which bind her, she can speak in “To dependence” of her ‘unfetter'd heart’ (“Sonnet lvii”, p. 51). And while to argue that Smith's abjection is typical makes sense of some of Smith's inconsolable lamentations, it does not sufficiently acknowledge the specificities of her position. Here we need to consider Smith's biographical situation. The complexity of her lyric voice, a voice which can ventriloquize Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe and Petrarch, as I will later argue, alerts us that her sonnets are not merely autobiographical; nevertheless we need to attend to Smith's self-presentation, the public space she constructs for herself by manipulating aspects of her private life.

Although she wrote out of financial necessity—indeed when the first volume of Elegiac Sonnets was published she was in debtors' prison—she was not a labouring poet, like Ann Yearsley, petitioning to be admitted into the salons of the upper classes. She styled herself on her title page, ‘Charlotte Smith of Bignor Park, in Sussex’, not Charlotte Smith of King's Bench. The fact that she had fallen socially is of key importance. Moreover, for many years she hoped or expected to be restored; like Miss Flite in Bleak House, she expected a judgement on her case. She wrote out of a sense of entitlement. For her the economy of mourning was literally a financial matter. When her father-in-law, Richard Smith, a wealthy merchant, died in 1776, he bequeathed much of his estate to her children to prevent Benjamin Smith from squandering it. Because his will was far from clear, Smith spent the rest of her life involved in a complex legal battle with the trustees and executors, always desperate for money, and repeatedly straining the patience of her patrons.¹⁴ The Preface to her second volume of Sonnets (1787) is outspoken in its exasperated resentment of the trustees who owed her money, and of the subscribers to her poems for whom she was obliged to write. She complains of the misfortunes she and her children have endured: the frustrated ambitions of her sons, the wounding of one of them, the death of her favourite daughter,

The rest deprived of every advantage to which they are entitled; and the means of proper education for my youngest son denied me! while the money that their inhuman trustees have suffered yearly to be wasted, and what they keep possession of on false and frivolous pretences, would, if paid to those it belongs to, have saved me and them from all those now irremediable misfortunes.

(pp. 7-8)

The Preface is a breaking into print of complaints Smith made in her letters. Her correspondence with Cadell and Davies, the London firm which published most of her poetical works, harps continually on the themes of loss and debt.¹⁵ She used them as her personal bankers and agents, and behaved as if she considered her works as security for interim loans which she expected them to make her while she was waiting for her rightful inheritance. In 1788 she wrote to an unnamed correspondent: ‘I have a Novel absolutely pawned to Cadell’.¹⁶ Writing, she believed, was only an interim measure. When in February 1795 it seemed that the will was about to be settled, she wrote to Cadell and Davies: ‘I hope therefore I shall no longer write for actual bread or appear in the mortifying character of a distrest Author’—but, she told him, as it would take a few weeks to sort out, in the meantime, ‘if you have five Guineas of mine in your hands I shall be much oblig'd to you to send it down’.¹⁷ The subscription for the second volume of sonnets was collected during a time of particular emotional and financial stress around the time of the death of Anna Augusta. A subscription edition is a charitable enterprise as well as a literary event; it felt to Smith like going cap in hand. In an undated letter to Cadell and Davies probably from around this time she angrily reminded them ‘how little either from birth or education or connections I ought to turn beggar’. She was always conscious of her former status, and no more so than when she was restored to something like comfort when her sons' income and the partial success of her litigation produced benefits at the end of her life. When she offered her Beachy Head volume to Cadell and Davies in 1805 she re-estimated her worth and announced: ‘The price I expect for it, is 300£. & a discharge of my debt to you’.¹⁸

Smith felt that her readers owed her pity just as she was owed money, security, status. Anna Seward complained of Smith's continual complaining that it was a ‘perpetual dun on pity’.¹⁹ Objecting to the fact that Smith was praised above Shakespeare and Milton by facile reviewers, Seward was critical of Smith's artistic ability, her characteristic mood and her relation to her predecessors. To Theophilus Smith she acidly wrote:

I forget if I ever spoke to you about Mrs C. Smith's everlasting lamentables, which she calls sonnets, made up of hackneyed scraps of dismality, with which her memory furnished her from our various poets. Never were poetical whipt syllabubs, in black glasses, so eagerly swallowed by the odd taste of the public.²⁰

Smith was troubled by accusations of plagiarism, and added notes identifying her ‘book debts’ from the third edition of her Sonnets. The conjunction of the charge of plagiarism and the characterization of her melancholy mood in Seward's criticism, although unsympathetic, points to a significant feature of Smith's poetics. By quoting and adapting the words of her predecessors she is at once retiring modestly behind them and assertively usurping them. (A similar double move of sympathetic identification and egoistical projection is made by Smith in her description and appropriation of the suffering of the French in her poem The Emigrants.) At the same time we should remember that the legacy Smith was pursuing was not for herself, but for her children. Simultaneously self-denying and usurping, Smith's sonnets are marked by melancholic self-abnegation, a kind of declaration of emotional bankruptcy.²¹

To work through the paradoxes contained in Smith's art of losing, what I want to do finally is to consider one sonnet in detail. (Smith's long footnote is given as an appendix to this article.)

“LXXIX”: “TO THE GODDESS OF BOTANY”∗

Of Folly weary, shrinking from the view
          Of Violence and Fraud, allow'd to take
          All peace from humble life; I would forsake
Their haunts for ever, and, sweet Nymph! with you
          Find shelter; where my tired, and tear-swoln eyes,
Among your silent shades of soothing hue,
          Your ‘bells and florets of unnumber'd dyes’
          Might rest—And learn the bright varieties
That from your lovely hands are fed with dew;
          And every veined leaf, that trembling sighs
In mead or woodland; or in wilds remote,
          Or lurk with mosses in the humid caves,
Mantle the cliffs, on dimpling rivers float,
          Or stream from coral rocks beneath the Ocean waves.

The irregular form and the subject matter of this sonnet are interesting in several respects which are both unusual and characteristic of Smith. It is unnerving as an elegy. The poet is ‘Of Folly weary, shrinking from the view / Of Violence and Fraud, allow'd to take / All peace from humble life …’ What has been lost? Not a loved one but, I suppose, peace. A lower-case peace has been ravished by personified Folly, Violence and Fraud. Smith is veiling the occasion of this elegy and distancing it from her own life, though she alludes to the violence of her losses in her massive footnote.

In both sonnets and elegies we expect structural and psychological turns. In the case of elegy we might have several turns, from the loved one to nature, another turn to blame those who should have protected the dead, perhaps a turn outwards to criticize the world, and a move to detach oneself from the dead and to transcend them by describing how they have transcended their earthly life. Thus Milton in ‘Lycidas’ masterfully works through a series of deflections from the death of the shepherd, to the decline of the church, to the resurrection of a spiritualized Lycidas whose renewed fertility regenerates Milton's poetry. In doing so Milton leaves behind his dead friend and surpasses his own previous poetry. In the Italian sonnet we would expect a turn after the octave signalling some change of thought or feeling. In the English sonnet the turn is deferred until the final couplet, a structure which, as Paul Fussell says, ‘invites images of balloons and pins’.²²

Smith's form follows neither model: after a closed quatrain (abba), there is an unusual involved middle section of two tercets (cdccdc), finished with an interlaced quatrain (efef).²³ Here the turn is away from Folly and so on to Botany, and it occurs very early on in the poem in the move across the fourth to the fifth line. Perhaps there is a second half-turn when Smith says she will not just find shelter but will learn the bright varieties of flowers (l. 8), or the shelter is found in the learning process. But we do not at the end turn away from nature, transcending it, nor is the idea clinched in a neat final couplet. Rather, the sonnet opens up in a series of parallel possibilities: ‘or in wilds remote …’, ‘Or lurk …’, ‘Or stream from coral rocks beneath the Ocean waves’. That last line seems both negative and positive. The image of streaming suggests directionality, progress; Peter Sacks notices the frequency with which images of springs or rivers occur in elegy. They may suggest inspiration, life force, the overcoming of a blockage, as opposed to images of the horizontal waste of the sea, a chaotic or negative force.²⁴ Smith's stream is buried under the sea, or rather stream is a verb and what we have is a surreal streaming out of bells and florets, and veined, trembling leaves from coral rocks beneath the ocean waves. It is not entirely clear what is the subject of the verb; do the leaves lurk, mantle and stream, or does Smith do so? Presumably the speaker ‘might rest … Or lurk’ while leaves sigh, but the syntax is so fluid that the speaker becomes lost in the imagined processes. Some of Smith's best sonnets situate the speaker on the sea shore on a perilous rocky cliff, contemplating the destructive forces of the sea. For example, in “Written on the sea shore.—October, 1784” (“Sonnet xii”, p. 20), she takes a solitary seat ‘On some rude fragment of the rocky shore’ and imagines herself shipwrecked and drowning with help arriving too late to save her. The ending of “Sonnet lxxix” is much more ambiguous: the subject of the elegy which is, I would argue, Smith's own life, both streams with natural renewal and drowns.

Given special emphasis in the centre of the sonnet, clasped in the double tercet, is a line from Milton's ‘Lycidas’. Poetry (in the form of a quotation) intervenes between the bad forces of human society (Folly, Violence and Fraud), and the comforts of nature (in the guise of Botany). Smith's ‘bells and florets of unnumber'd dyes’ actually misremembers Milton's ‘Bells, and Flowrets of a thousand hues’ (l. 135); ‘hues’ finds its way into the ‘soothing hue’ of the line above, and ‘unnumber'd’ might suggest that Smith has in mind flowers that are not numbered in verse. Her misquotation suggests gendered differences between their uses of nature and of elegy. Milton's ‘bells and flowerets’ appear in a section of ‘Lycidas’ in which he is calling for the return of a golden age:

                                                                                                    Return Sicilian Muse,
And call the Vales, and bid them hither cast
Their Bells, and Flowrets of a thousand hues.(25)

These lovely arcadian flowers, some described as artificial or endowed with human attributed (‘quaint enameld eyes’, l. 139), are to be plucked ‘To strew the Laureat Herse where Lycid lies' (l. 151). In Smith's sonnet, on the other hand, these flowers do not inhabit a mythical realm; she claims that the haunts of Botany are readily accessible. Her language is more technical; the revision ‘florets’ suggests that ‘varieties’, ‘humid’ and ‘mantle’ also have the kind of scientific accuracy which, as Donald Davie has shown, is characteristic of Augustan poetic diction.²⁶ Botany in the late eighteenth century was considered a proper subject of study for women (but not exclusively a feminine preserve). The natural worlds of “Sonnet lxxix” and of ‘Lycidas’ are not quite the same, and the poets behave differently in them. Unlike Milton, Smith will not pluck these flowers in a castrative and substitutive gesture, rather she wishes to learn how they sigh, and lurk, mantle and stream. Her gaze is not completely natural or neutral: she sees through the eyes of poetry and of science, eyes ‘tear-swoln’, but she wishes to observe nature, not to violate and transcend it.²⁷

Charlotte Smith arrives at an ambiguous elegiac solution, for she does not find a detached token to substitute for the lost object. This ambiguity is echoed in her use of Milton, and thus in her sense of her relation to poetry. The fact that she includes Milton in inverted commas marks off his poetry as something that she wishes to associate herself with, but cannot surpass. Yet this poem is assertive as well as retiring. Smith adds a massive footnote which makes some pretty grand claims for her art, her right to enter the realm of poetry, and her social position, claims which are far from modest, though they pretend to appear so.²⁸ While describing a mood of complete abjection, Smith allies herself with Milton, Rousseau and Shakespeare by weaving her sorrows with theirs. She admits that she is ‘without any pretensions to those talents which were in [Rousseau] so heavily taxed with that excessive irritability, too often if not always the attendant on genius’, but because she asserts that she has the same sentiments as these great writers, and has suffered as the speakers she quotes have suffered, she also claims an entitlement to speak in their words. She says that, like Rousseau, ‘I have been engaged in contending with persons whose cruelty has left so painful an impression on my mind, that I may well say, “Brillantes fleurs …’”. Finally she makes a strange approach at voicing Lear's tragic lament ‘I am bound upon a wheel of fire …’, by veiling her presumption first in the plural pronoun (‘compels us’) then in an imagined sufferer who ‘feels like the wretched Lear’. Thus, slantwise, she appropriates these voices and advances on their genius.²⁹

Smith writes strange elegies because, instead of being able to renounce what she has lost, or to say farewell to the dead, she feels that she is entitled to have what she has lost restored to her. What psychoanalysts refer to as ‘the work of mourning’ is for her partly a legal process of recovering an inheritance in the courts. That sense of entitlement is also there in her belief that because she has suffered like the great tragic figures, she has the right to voice her suffering in poetry. Nevertheless, her poetry is not haughtily presumptuous; it is marked by modest or self-cancelling gestures. After having been accused of plagiarism, she admitted her debts to her forebears by acknowledging them in footnotes and appendices. Furthermore she resists the traditional consolations of elegy, preferring to remain defeated and alienated, submerged beneath the ocean waves. I think it is also significant that the inheritance she was claiming was not for herself but for her children: she was still acting as mother-martyr. Nevertheless, although she does not achieve a ‘successful’ mourning, she does not succumb completely to melancholia because she does at least voice her lack, dunning the public for the pity she believes they owe her. Coleridge argued that elegy ‘presents everything as lost and gone, or absent and future’.³⁰ Smith exists in a continual present of suffering, refusing nostalgic assimilation to a past imagined as whole, or an idealistic transcendence in the future; rather she makes an eternity of her present woe. In the end, given the complex exchange of energies in Smith's poetry, the debt does not run all one way; the binary opposition between losses and gains may not be an appropriate model when self-effacement can be so visible and so vivid.

APPENDIX

“SONNET LXXIX”: “TO THE GODDESS OF BOTANY”∗

‘Rightly to spell’, as Milton wishes, in Il Penseroso, ‘Of every herb that sips the dew’ [ll. 170-2] seems to be a resource for the sick at heart—for those who from sorrow or disgust may without affectation say ‘Society is nothing to one not sociable!’ [‘society is no comfort / To one not sociable’—Shakespeare, Cymbeline, iv.ii.12-13] and whose wearied eyes and languid spirits find relief and repose amidst the shades of vegetable nature.—I cannot now turn to any other pursuit that for a moment soothes my wounded mind.

‘Je pris gout a cette récreation des yeux, qui dans l'infortune, repose, amuse, distrait l'esprit, et suspend le sentiment des peines’ [I took a liking to this recreation of the eyes, which in misfortune rests, amuses, distracts the spirit and suspends the feelings of pain.] Thus speaks the singular, the unhappy Rousseau, when in his ‘Promenades’ [Reveries du Promenade Solitaire, Book 7] he enumerates the causes which drove him from the society of men, and occasioned his pursuing with renewed avidity the study of Botany. ‘I was’, says he, ‘Forcé de m'abstenir de penser, de peur de penser a mes malheurs malgré moi; forcé de contenir les restes d'une imagination riante, mais languissante, que tant d'angoisses pourroient effaroucher a la fin—’ [‘I was forced to keep myself from thinking, to fear thinking about my misfortunes despite myself, was forced to repress the remnants of a cheerful but stagnant imagination which so much distress could startle to its end’].

Without any pretensions to those talents which were in him so heavily taxed with that excessive irritability, too often if not always attendant on genius, it has been my misfortune to have endured real calamities that have disqualified me for finding any enjoyment in the pleasures and pursuits which occupy the generality of the world. I have been engaged in contending with persons whose cruelty has left so painful an impression on my mind, that I may well say, ‘Brillantes fleurs, émail des prés[,] ombrages frais, [ruisseaux,] bosquets, verdure, venez purifier mon imagination de tous [salie par tous] ces hideux objects!’ [‘Brilliant flowers, adornment of meadows, cool shades, [streams,] foliage, come purify my imagination sullied by all these hideous objects.’]

Perhaps, if any situation is more pitiable than that which compels us to wish to escape from the common business and forms of life, it is that where the sentiment is forcibly felt, while it cannot be indulged; and where the sufferer, chained down to the discharge of duties from which the wearied spirit recoils, feels like the wretched Lear, when Shakespeare makes him exclaim ‘Oh! I am bound upon a wheel of fire, / Which my own tears do scald like melted lead’ (King Lear, iv.viii.47-8).³¹

Notes

1. Jane Austen, Persuasion, ed. John Davie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 82.

2. Suggested by Anne Ehrenpreis in her introduction to Emmeline (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. xiii, n. 1. Austen also alludes ironically to Emmeline (1788) in ‘Catherine, or The Bower’ (1792) and Northanger Abbey (1818). Quotations from Smith's poems are taken throughout from The Poems of Charlotte Smith, ed. Stuart Curran (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).

3. Aside from her Sonnets, Smith's publications include a long blank verse poem, The Emigrants (1793); several translations; ten novels written between 1788 and 1798; several volumes of mixed poetry and prose intended to introduce children to botany; and a volume of poetry left uncompleted at her death and published posthumously, Beachy Head and Other Poems (1807).

4. Later called Elegiac Sonnets, and Other Poems, Elegiac Sonnets, and Other Essays by Charlotte Smith of Bignor Park, in Sussex was first published by Dodsley in 1784; it was taken over by Cadell and Davies and expanded in subsequent editions. In 1789 a further expanded fifth edition, including poems from her novels, was published by subscription. A second volume was published by subscription in 1797; the two volumes were issued together in 1800, comprising the ninth edition of the first volume and the second edition of the second.

5. Peter M. Sacks, The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spencer to Yeats (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), p. 8.

6. Jahan Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

7. See Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, trans. Joan Riviere, General Psychoanalytical Theory, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Macmillan, 1963), pp. 164-79.

8. Celeste M. Schenck, ‘Feminism and Deconstruction: Re-Constructing the Elegy’, Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, 5 (1986), pp. 13-27.

9. See, for example, sonnets xxvi, xxx, xxxii, lxxiv, lxxviii, lxxxii, lxxxix, xc, xci in The Poems of Charlotte Smith.

10. Letters of Anna Seward: Written between the Years 1784 and 1807, 6 vols (Edinburgh and London, 1811), letter lxxi, to Theophilus Swift, 9 July 1789, vol. 2, p. 287.

11. Stuart Curran, ‘Romantic Poetry: The I Altered’, in Anne K. Mellor, (ed.), Romanticism and Feminism (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988), p. 200.

12. See, e.g. Curran's introduction to The Poems of Charlotte Smith, op. cit., p. xix.

13. The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. E. De Selincourt and Helen Darbishire (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), vol. 4, p. 403.

14. In 1799 the principal issues of the will were resolved, but settlement was delayed. The will was finally resolved a few months before Smith's death in 1806, but it was not until 1813 that her four surviving children finally came into their inheritance. For details see Judith Phillips Stanton, ‘Charlotte Smith's “Literary Business”: Income, Patronage, and Indigence’, in Paul J. Korshin (ed.), The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual, vol. I (New York: AMS Press, 1987) pp. 375-401; and Curran's Introduction to The Poems of Charlotte Smith, esp. pp. xx-xxii.

15. Smith dealt initially with Thomas Cadell, Snr, with whom she came to a sympathetic arrangement; when he retired his successors, Thomas Cadell, Jr and William Davies, were less willing to give her such favourable terms for publishing her works, or to provide such frequent handouts. Her exchanges with them are frequently heated as she assumed they would publish whatever she chose to write. When they declined to accept her continuation of Rural Walks, she had her patron, the Duchess of Dorset, persuade them to do so (see her letters to Cadell and Davies, dated 20 February, 17 May, and 3 June 1795, in Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT).

16. Letter to [?], 10 February [1788?] (Beinecke).

17. Letter to Cadell and Davies, 20 February 1795 (Beinecke).

18. Letter to Cadell and Davies, 2 September 1805 (Beinecke). She had sold the copyright of the first volume of her sonnets to Cadell, Sr for £40 (see her letter to Cadell, Sr, 8 September 1790 in the Houghton Library). Cadell and Davies refused and suggested, to her indignation, raising another subscription. She tried the scheme again in 1806, but the collection was eventually published by Johnson after her death.

19. Quoted in Curran, Introduction to Poems of Charlotte Smith, op. cit., p. xxv. See also Letters of Anna Seward, vol. vi, p. 43.

20. Letter lxxi, 9 July 1789, in Letters, vol. ii, p. 287.

21. Considered in the light of Freud's ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, Smith might be seen as a depressive, punishing her husband for his inadequacies by assuming them herself.

22. Paul Fussell, Poetic Meter and Poetic Form (New York: Random House, 1965), p. 128.

23. Seward disapproved of Smith's formal experiments; in her discussions of the sonnet she dismissed Smith as inefficient (see Letters, vol. ii, pp. 162-3, 222-24; vol. v, p. 58).

24. The English Elegy, p. 97.

25. ‘Lycidas’, in Milton's Poems, ed. B. A. Wright (London: J. M. Dent, 1969), ll.133-5, pp. 44-5.

26. Donald Davie, The Language of Science and the Language of Literature, 1700-1740 (London: Sheed and Ward, 1963).

27. Judith Pascoe argues that Smith's botanical eye is truer to nature than the male Romantic gaze (‘Female Botanists and the Poetry of Charlotte Smith’, Re-visioning Romanticism: British Women Writers, 1776-1837, ed. Carol Shiner Wilson and Joel Haefner (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), pp. 193-209). Curran states that ‘Beachy Head’ testifies to an alternate Romanticism that seeks not to transcend or to absorb nature but to contemplate and honor its irreducible alterity’ (Introduction, p. xxviii). Botany, however, has its troubling aspects; not only can it augment traditional symbolic identifications between the delicacy, transience and triviality of flowers and that of women, it imposes culturally specific systems of order on nature. The relationships between Smith, and nature, and romanticism need further study.

28. See Appendix, below.

29. She also ventriloquizes Petrarch and Werther, and in many of her sonnets she includes fragments of Shakespeare, always quoting from his plays, perhaps preferring to think in dramatic terms rather than contesting the immortal territory mapped out by the sonnets.

30. The Table Talk and Omniana of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London, 1917), p. 281.

31. From Poems of Charlotte Smith, p. 68; translations by the editor.