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Varieties of Privacy in Charlotte Smith's Poetry

This essay proposes a reconsideration of the Romantic category of the private in the wake of the field’s recent wave of studies focusing on the public sphere and sociability. Charlotte Smith’s sustained treatment of private experience in her poetry provides the occasion for asking how the period’s long‐standing association with the private might be read differently in the aftermath of a new understanding of myriad Romantic publics, and in particular, the reading public. Across her long career, Smith developed varieties of privacy that are most starkly distinguished in works that begin and end her career, Elegiac Sonnets (1784) and the poem Beachy Head (1806). While the former strictly defines privacy as solitude and secrecy, the latter equates privacy with intimacy, a difference that may be gauged by her poet’s implied relationship with readers. Beachy Head thus shares with the contemporaneous genre of the familiar letter a notion of writing as conversation across time and distance and of the physical object (a letter or poem) as a token of intimate exchange.