Charlotte Smith, whose reputation currently rests on her achievement as a novelist, rose to fame as a poet during the late eighteenth century. Smith has associations with the canonical Romantic poets: her early treatment of the English sonnet influenced both Samuel Taylor Coleridge and John Keats, while William Wordsworth not only experimented with the stanza form of "Saint Monica" (published in Beachy Head: With Other Poems, 1807), one of Smith's last poems, but also admired the "true feeling for rural nature" evident in all her work. Smith wrote prolifically, producing three books of poetry, two translations, ten novels, and six works for children. Although she wrote to express intense emotion, Smith was never simply the Shelleyan "nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds"; she wrote to support her family. The early marriage that left Smith with twelve children to feed pushed...