Charlotte (Turner) Smith (1749–1806) began her literary career relatively late in life. Married at age sixteen, she bore and reared ten children. She began writing to earn money when her husband was sent to debtor's prison. Her book of poems, Elegiac Sonnets (1784), was so popular that it eventually went through eleven editions. It also influenced major Romantic poets such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, as well as the Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Smith's poems presage the Romantic Era both in their preoccupation with self-analysis and in their focus on nature and natural beauty, the latter reflecting Smith's attachment to the Sussex countryside of her youth.

Although Smith continued to write poetry after the success of her first book, this work did not by itself provide sufficient income for her family, so she began writing novels. Her first novel, Emmeline, the Orphan of the Castle (1788), was very successful. For several years she produced a book each year, and in all, published over twenty books. The Old Manor House (1793) is considered her finest fiction work. Many of her novels, such as Desmond (1792), express her sympathy with the ideals of Rousseau and the French Revolution (1789). However, critics considered her novels too political for a woman and disparaged her belief in the moral equality of the social classes. Thus, although her writing was highly regarded by major writers and was popular enough to produce an income sufficient to support a family of eleven, her work eventually fell into obscurity.