SOURCE: Zimmerman, Sarah M. “‘Dost thou not know my voice?’: Charlotte Smith and the Lyric's Audience.” In Romanticism, Lyricism, and History, pp. 39-72. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999.

In the following excerpt, Zimmerman explores Smith's strategy of appealing to the readers of her sonnets by developing a persona that is completely absorbed in private sorrow and oblivious to her audience.

O! grief hath chang'd me since you saw me last, And careful hours with time's deformed hand Have written strange defeatures in my face: But tell me yet, dost thou not know my voice? 

—The Comedy of Errors (V.i.298-301)

No other grief that ever sighed has worn so much crape and bombazine.

—Viscount St. Cyres on Smith (1903)

Two poems addressed to Charlotte Smith appear in the August 1786 edition of the European Magazine, one submitted by “W. P.,” another by a “constant Reader.” The poems...