ABSTRACT
This chapter offers an extended examination of Charlotte Smith's approach to poetic production who explores her influence on writers as diverse as 'The British Sappho', Mary Robinson; a Della Cruscan by the name of 'Pastor Fido'; and the most famous novelist of the period, Ann Radcliffe. Kelley notes that Smith has emerged in recent criticism as 'a poet whose appropriations of genre and voice convey in singular fashion the Romantic impulse to laminate biography and poetic identity with public as well as personal ends in view'. Smith's female Romantic is a woman of great sensibility and sensitivity, whose love of the natural world cannot compensate for the suffering she is forced to endure at the hands of an unfeeling society. Smith's approach to poetic production is the fact that she was able to achieve success in the field of literary endeavour without ever compromising substantially her own claims to gentility and normative femininity.
