Charlotte Turner Smith was one of the most prominent women writers of the English Romantic movement, known in particular for her sonnets. She was born in London in 1749. Her mother most likely died in childbirth when Smith was a young child, causing her and her siblings to be largely raised by an aunt. Smith was educated according to the mores of Britain's landed gentry, learning such skills as dancing and drawing. From a young age, she was noted for her literary abilities, and even submitted some poems for publication. However, when she was in her early adolescence, Smith's father lost his fortune and several of his estates. His financial difficulties prompted him to remarry—and to accept a proposal on his daughter's behalf. When she was fifteen years old, Smith was married to the twenty-one-year-old merchant Benjamin Smith. His finances promised some relief from her family's troubles, since he had made a great deal of money from the transatlantic slave trade.
Smith would later call this marriage "legal prostitution," and she evidently dealt with a good deal of hardship over the course of it. She objected to her husband's involvement in the slave trade, critiquing slavery in poems such as "Beachy Head," even while relying on his income. She gave birth to twelve children, only half of whom outlived her. Meanwhile, her husband's reckless personality brought about both financial uncertainty and reputational strain. He was sent to a debtor's prison in 1783, and Smith joined him for a stretch of his sentence. She intervened in some of her husband's business troubles, but also used her own writing as a source of income.
Smith's works, collected in the volume Elegiac Sonnets, and other Essays by Charlotte Smith of Bignor Park, Sussex, were published in 1784 to great success. Newly popular, Smith produced both poetry and prose, including novels and, later, a two-volume history of England. As the title of her first book suggests, she was known for discussing themes of grief and evoking sinister moods, though her work also often touched on both radical politics and the natural world. Smith was a supporter of the French Revolution, though later critical of its more radical fringe, and she supported reform in England.
She died in 1806 at the age of fifty-seven. Smith was considered an early pioneer of the Romantic movement. credited by successors such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Wordsworth called her "a lady to whom English verse is under greater obligations than are likely to be either acknowledged or remembered," and her popularity has waxed and waned throughout literary history, piquing the interest of such diverse movements as Gothic literature and postcolonial studies.
"Written Near a Port on a Dark Evening" is a sonnet written by the English poet and novelist Charlotte Smith, using a description of an ominous nighttime landscape as an extended metaphor for the uncertainty of life itself. Written in roughly...
