ABSTRACT
This chapter explores representations of Charlotte Smith within the publications to reveal her colourful fate in posterity. During her lifetime Charlotte Smith was a literary celebrity: her Elegiac Sonnets and Other Poems were continuously reprinted and widely emulated. Smith is portrayed as a loyal wife, grieving mother and idealized female scholar. The tragic events and cameos within the memoir are cited verbatim in later renderings, and so the fictionalized version of Smith is propelled into literary history. Whilst in Smith's case Pity generally presided in posterity, rehearsing her sad story to distant ages, various indiscretions would create problems for Smith as she was reincarnated as a poetess. Whilst the absence of women poets from our literary histories has been a ubiquitous complaint, Smith was not entirely forgotten: her contribution was assessed in a variety of nineteenth-century anthologies, dictionaries and celebrations of 'lost' female talent.
