In Light of Charlotte Smith...

Born May4 1749-Died October 28 1806

I can honestly say that I am not satisfied with the yielded results on Charlotte Smith seeing as how her sonnets were compared to Shakespeare and Milton. I did manage to find out that Smith had a very demanding life with plenty of struggling along the way. She married Benjamin Smith, an initially wealthy mean who lost the wealth and was put into prison where he left her with one of his illegitimate children (and some of their own). Eventually she moved into debtors prison with him. She wrote the novels to gain money for the family.

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For those of you looking further into Smith's work there is actually a fair amount of literary criticism on her if you look hard enough.
This article by Daniel Robinson gets more interesting and detailed about Smith's Elegiac Sonnets toward the middle. This is an interesting article looking into the melancholy and paradox of her poetry.
Oh! I just found this and it's very exciting....The British Women Romantic Poets Project at UC Davis. You can look up anyone, but if you look up Smith you can find some engraved picture copies of the title pages from the sonnets and more.
When you didn't think it could get anymore exciting there's this article on considering medical discourse and the problem of sensibility in Smith's sonnets. Apparently "Charlotte Smith’s representation of melancholia in her Elegiac Sonnets returns to the mid-eighteenth-century understanding of the illness, which portrayed the melancholic as a person of both sensibility
and rationality". Read on!
One last tidbit: This is a longer overview from Huntington Library Quarterly on Smith's life with a lot of focus on her struggles and all of the different types of literature she wrote including a comedic play, children's books, and anti-war poems.