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...