In 1784, when Charlotte Smith ventured into print with her first volume of Elegiac Sonnets, she was in Kings Bench Prison with her spendthrift husband, Benjamin. Well-born but married to a merchant's son at fifteen, Smith's first act as a professional writer in the Preface to the sonnets was to deny the life her marriage had brought her, and to refer the reader to a substantially fictional version of herself. She is not Charlotte Smith of King's Bench Prison, but ‘Charlotte Smith of Bignor Park, in Sussex’, her childhood home. Jacqueline Labbe has noted that ‘even in 1784 Bignor Park is not Smith's home, but her younger brother's (the legal heir), and her claim (in the Elegiac Sonnets) resonates with its own impossibility’. What, then, are we to make of Smith's decision to identify herself with a place that had not been her home for nearly twenty years? Smith's choice seems to have been informed in part by anxiety about her class status. Stuart Curran has suggested that Smith's desire to write poetry is itself an assertion of a particular class identity. Therefore, when her current social position did not match that which she imagined she ought to occupy (through both birth and her literary activities), Smith manipulated the reality to construct a more appropriate identity with which the public was to be presented. The sonnet form was particularly suited to the sort of relationship Smith was attempting to establish with her readers, as Stephen Behrendt has argued: