Charlotte Smith and the quest for the romantic prophetic voice

Abstract

As a woman writing at the close of the eighteenth century, Charlotte Smith found herself working within a literary tradition that perceived the poet as heir to the masculine tradition of Milton and Shakespeare and represented woman as muse for male poets. She wrote at the beginning of a powerful Romantic movement that necessitated an autonomous self. Yet against tremendous odds, Smith produced ten novels and several volumes of poetry and influenced the major female and male authors of the time. During a time when women writers were condemned for expressing any ideas that might disrupt the status quo, Smith constructed an authoritative persona that helped her negotiate between the societal expectations of a woman and those of a writer, challenging the assumptions of what constitutes an authoritative voice and creating a femininepoetics.