SOURCE: Kennedy, Deborah. “Thorns and Roses: The Sonnets of Charlotte Smith.” Women's Writing: The Elizabethan to Victorian Period 2, no. 1 (1995): 43-53.

In the following essay, Kennedy discusses the autobiographical content of Smith's Elegiac Sonnets.

In her book on sensibility, Janet Todd traces the development of the figure of the melancholy poet, which had become a common literary type by the mid-eighteenth century.¹ The models were men of feeling like Thomas Gray and Edward Young; there were no popular female equivalents until Charlotte Smith published her aptly named Elegiac Sonnets in 1784.² Although other women had written melancholic poems, no one had produced an entire collection in this vein. Lady Mary Wroth's sombre sonnets of 1621 (neglected until recently) might provide a parallel, except that Wroth's, unlike Smith's, focus on unrequited love.³ As well, in the early eighteenth century, Anne Finch wrote a number of melancholic poems, which form one part of...