SOURCE: Labbe, Jacqueline M. “Selling One's Sorrows: Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson, and the Marketing of Poetry.” The Wordsworth Circle 25, no. 2 (spring 1994): 68-71.

In the following excerpt, Labbe illustrates the way Mary Robinson and Charlotte Smith exploited their gender so that their audience saw them as women writing out of economic necessity, rather than as women breaking social expectations.

Charlotte Smith and Mary Robinson, two of the many women poets writing during the period we are used to calling Romantic, are both becoming more accessible: Stuart Curran's edition of Smith's poems, published by Oxford, will soon be accompanied by Judith Pascoe's edition of Robinson's work. Their works will therefore be available to our late 20th-century eyes in much the same way that they were to late 18th- and early 19th-century readers. In this paper I suggest that for this earlier group of readers the poems resonate with a certain...