During her lifetime Charlotte Smith was a literary celebrity : her Elegiac Sonnets and Other Poems (1784) were continuously reprinted and widely emulated. She was a popular and prolific author, excelling in a series of novels, collections of verse and translations. Smith's high volume of output, in a range of genres, reflects the deepening financial crisis that she was working to alleviate. Smith's plight is well-known: she became a professional writer as a means of supporting her debt-ridden husband and nine dependent children, whilst she battled with the trustees of her father-in-law's will for a dwindling inheritance. Yet her motives were not purely financial. Smith was aware of her status as a writer with ‘a reputation to lose’ and her letters reveal her ambition to be taken seriously as a poet. Smith aspired to a place in posterity, but her contemporary success failed to secure her a position within the newly-emerging national canon. Whilst the absence of women poets from our literary histories has been a ubiquitous complaint, Smith was not entirely forgotten: her contribution was assessed in a variety of nineteenth-century anthologies, dictionaries and celebrations of ‘lost’ female talent. This essay will explore representations of Charlotte Smith within these publications to reveal her colourful fate in posterity.

Smith's place in history is strongly influenced by the nature of her contemporary popularity, and in particular by her attractive public image. Smith was a brilliant self-promoter and exploited the marketing potential of her miserable life, casting herself as the ‘tragic heroine’ in the theatrical performance that was her career. Jacqueline Labbe has argued that Smith creates a fictional situation in her sonnet s which ‘relies on her readers seeing and reading her … in a variety of culturally recognizable roles’, tapping into the romantic appeal of conventional feminine types including the devoted mother and the distressed woman-inneed.