ABSTRACT
The history of the footnote is a history of the margins; as Anthony Grafton notes in the first contemporary study of this uniquely tangential, retiring, self-abnegating apparatus, they provide the space wherein writers offer proof, support their colleagues, deride their competitors, list their sources. The footnotes function as the textual boundary at which Charlotte Smith straddles gender as well as culture, where she reinterprets the dependence she both exposes and embraces in the poem-proper. As a woman writer, however, Smith had a trickier terrain to negotiate than her male peers. Traversing the landscape of learning required, for Smith and other female poets, a more unusual compass than one which merely showed direction. In 1784, Charlotte Smith published her first book of poetry, Elegiac Sonnets, partly as a wifely response to her husband's need: Benjamin Smith, ever the profligate husband, finally contracted enough debt to land himself in prison, and Smith's publication was a money-making venture.
