内容説明
Charlotte Smith's life was the stuff of romantic anguish; upon marriage she felt exiled in "personal slavery", and began publishing poems to earn money while in debtor's prison with her extravagant husband. They subsequently resided in France and lived on subscriptions to her poems and translation work, but she eventually left her husband, "fearing my life was not safe", and began publishing novels annually in order to provide for her children. Smith was the first English poet whom, in retrospect, we could call Romantic, and was particularly influential on Wordsworth's style and ideas. Her poetry, beginning with the first edition of Elegaic Sonnets in 1784, was well received by her contemporaries; her final masterpiece, Beachy Head, published posthumously in 1807, powerfully illustrates the impulse to resolve the self into nature. Today, Smith is known primarily as a novelist (her previously un-reprinted novel, The Banished Man, will appear in the series), but this volume will be the first complete collection of her poems. It promises to revolutionize our ideas about the development of English Romanticism. This unprecedented new series reintroduces women's writings of cultural and literary interest, from the Medieval period through the early nineteenth century, often for the first time since their original publication. Derived from the Brown University Women Writers Project, the series unearths a wide range of neglected gems, dispelling the myth that women wrote little of real value before the Victorian period. Each volume includes an introduction putting the work in its historical and literary context and helpful explanatory notes.
Book Description
Charlotte Smith (1749-1806) was the author of ten novels, a play, and a host of innovative educational books for children, as well as several volumes of poetry that helped set priorities and determine the tastes of the culture of early Romanticism. Her Elegiac Sonnets sparked the sonnet revival in English Romanticism; The Emigrants initiated its passion for lengthy meditative introspection; and Beachy Head lent its poetic engagement with nature a uniquely telling immediacy. Smith was a woman, Wordsworth remarked a quarter century after her death, "to whom English verse is under greater obligations than are likely to be either acknowledged or remembered." True to his prediction, Smith's poetry has virtually dropped from sight and thus from cultural consciousness. This, the first edition of Smith's collected poems, will restore to all students of English poetry a distinctive, compelling voice. Likewise, the recovery of Smith to her rightful place among the Romantic poets must spur the reassessment of the place of women writers within that culture.
