SOURCE: Zimmerman, Sarah. “Charlotte Smith's Letters and the Practice of Self-Presentation.” Princeton University Library Chronicle 53, no. 1 (autumn 1991): 50-77.

In the following essay, Zimmerman discusses Smith's constant efforts to present herself to her readers and publishers as a woman attempting to support her children through her writings.

In a letter to her publishers written in March 1797, Charlotte Smith requests changes to a portrait for a new edition of her Elegiac Sonnets, the collection of poems which had already undergone seven editions since its initial appearance in 1784.¹ The engraving provided a visual counterpart to the verbal self-portrait that her writings comprised. Smith was sharply aware that her continuing success was generated largely by her readers' sympathetic response to a figure of herself as elegiac poet. The alterations represent subtle refinements in a practice of self-presentation which had helped to make her, by the time she wrote the letter, one of...