Charlotte Smith's influence on Romantic-era poetry was profound and long-lasting. Although conventional literary history has long ignored the period's women poets, including Smith, her importance to her contemporaries is apparent from the many poems – by both women and men – that commemorate her life, her work and her influence. Smith's continuing presence in the writings of her contemporaries and successors provides a barometer both of her own reputation and, more important, of the varieties of influence and authority she exerted upon the British Romantic literary community. While these writings testify to her poetry 's centrality to the literary culture, they also indicate the paradigmatic value – especially for women writers – of a writer whose personal difficulties were widely known and who achieved commercial success in part because of the skill with which she mythologized her own physical and psychological experience in poems whose evocative power touched the lives and experiences of many contemporaries. This essay examines a range of the responses – by both canonical writers like Wordsworth and unfamiliar ones like Mariann Dark, Martha Hanson and Thomas Gent – to Smith's poetry in particular, including public testimonials that appeared in the periodical press following her death. It considers how these responses, which persisted into the 1820s, contributed to the myth-making that Smith's own writings – including the often intensely personal pleading prefaces to her novels – encouraged among writers who read her poetry with care and with empathy. The essay is not a literary study of Smith's sonnets, then, but a cultural study of reputation and influence that documents the extensive literary community that was united – at least briefly and circumstantially – through the common theme of Smith and her writing.

It was the autumn of 1808: Charlotte Smith had been dead for just over a year, Mary Robinson since 1800. Reviews of Smith's Beachy Head combined measured assessment of the verse with remarks on the recently deceased author's life and reputation, while Robinson had re-entered the critical conversation following the publication in 1806 of the edition of her poems prepared by her daughter.

Literary study focuses primarily upon literary texts, their authors, and the historical and cultural circumstances surrounding the origin, production, and assessment of those texts. The books themselves we customarily take for granted as the raw material for critical and theoretical analysis. But for their publishers, books are commodities possessing both real and virtual “value” in the public economic sphere. However authors and scholars may choose to see things, publishing has always been a “business,” and publishers necessarily have wholly mercenary interests in the fortunes of the authors they publish. Already in the eighteenth century it was apparent that “even a sound work may depend on the publisher's exertions . . . for securing a hold on the public mind.” An author's success - or failure - was tied as much to their publishers' marketing skills as to their own literary talent. Popular success required access to an interested readership, and publishers and booksellers were the gateway through which authors had to pass. Although publishers had an obvious financial stake in the books they published, the authors were no less heavily invested. The Romantic era's greatest and most popular novelist, Sir Walter Scott, provides a good example. Although Scott had been Britain's most popular living poet, when Waverley appeared on July 7, 1814, his poetic star been eclipsed by that of the Regency's new literary sensation, Lord Byron, whose Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, cantos I and II, had appeared in March 1812, catapulting their author into immediate stardom.