ABSTRACT

When William Hayley invited Charlotte Smith to join him at Eartham for a writer's retreat, the poet William Cowper observed her ‘[c]hain'd to her desk like a slave to his oar’. 1 She would produce twenty new pages in a morning – an extraordinary pace – and read them to Hayley's guests in the afternoon. Cowper did not acknowledge, or perhaps did not see, that Smith was, as Sarah Zimmerman writes, ‘pursu[ing] two writing careers at once: her published works and a copious correspondence’, 2 a significant portion of which letters are published in The Collected Letters of Charlotte Smith. This collection, and Stuart Curran's magisterial edition of her works now complete at Pickering & Chatto, mark Smith's rising star, a new mini-industry of Smithian studies, engaging us in the most honourable and exciting project of elaborating on and proving Curran's bold and welcome claim that Charlotte Smith is the first Romantic poet.