In 1784, Charlotte Turner Smith was in a debtors’ prison with her husband when she published a small book of sonnets that gave her name to readers across England. The Elegiac Sonnets and Other Poems collects these short poems, full of melancholy, nature and personal feeling: nightingales, evenings, the sea, the changing of seasons and the sorrow of a life that did not go as it should. Her sonnets were admired by readers and influenced poets who came after her. This recording is made up of 107 short chapters, mostly sonnets and a few longer poems, read by two LibriVox volunteers over about three hours. It is a gentle, reflective collection that shows how poetry could give voice to private distress at the end of the eighteenth century. Gentle, melancholy and beautifully shaped, they reward slow listening.
Introduction
Charlotte Turner Smith, who lived from 1749 to 1806, was an English poet and novelist. She is credited with starting a revival of the English sonnet, and she helped to establish the conventions of Gothic fiction in her novels. She also wrote political novels of sensibility, in which she took up questions of justice and the fate of women. It was in 1784, in a debtors’ prison with her husband Benjamin, that she wrote and published her first work, Elegiac Sonnets, and its success allowed her to continue writing to support her large family.
The sonnets were published in a series of editions, with new poems added each time, and they were popular for many years. Their themes are those of sensibility, the movement that valued feeling: grief, solitude, the beauty of the natural world, the sadness of the evening and the memory of lost happiness. The revival of the form that she began was taken up by later writers, and William Wordsworth was among those who admired her work.
The edition recorded here was published in 1827, after her death, and it combines the sonnets with other poems. The reading is divided into 107 chapters, each a poem, beginning with “Sonnet I” and the sonnet written at the close of spring, and the whole lasts a little over three hours. Two LibriVox volunteers share the work.
Today, Smith’s poems are of renewed interest to readers of the Romantic period, who value her as an early voice of feeling and a forerunner of the poets who followed. Listening in short pieces makes them easy to enjoy. Many of the poems are only fourteen lines long, so the 107 chapters pass quickly and invite the listener to dip in at random.
Public domain
Charlotte Turner Smith died in 1806: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
