More than any other poet, Charlotte Smith was responsible for the revival of interest in the sonnet in Britain, which had languished since Milton’s day, when she published Elegiac Sonnets in 1784, with many expanded editions in the next few years. The return of the sonnet characterizes Romanticism across Europe; there are twenty-one of them in this anthology. Smith went on to write novels, also well received, and translations from the French. Her sonnets were sometimes criticized for their “elegiac” mood, but her own life, after a happy childhood, was blighted by a loveless marriage to an improvident man; she had to support ten children with her literary earnings.