Jonty Claypole

She's going to save their finances through poetry.

And happily, it's one of the only times in history this has worked.

It does work.

She writes and publishes a collection of sonnets.

And it's these sonnets which really kickstart and inspire romanticism as a movement.

And by that, I mean that the sonnets are written from the viewpoint of a isolated individual poet, Charlotte Smith herself.

She's generally in the sonnets alone in nature.

So there are sonnets about graveyards at nighttime.

There are sonnets about nightingales.

And all of these are ideas that Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Wordsworth are going to take from her.

And in fact, both of them later acknowledged the debt.

And I find it fascinating that she's writing a lot of these sonnets about being alone with nature while actually inside a very squalid London debtors prison.

That's right.

Yeah.

She writes her way out of it.

But then in 1787, a couple of years later, she makes the incredibly radical decision to leave her husband.

And she wrote that she had to.

She said that he was, quote, so cruel that her life was not safe.

So she finds herself independent.

She sort of lost custody of the children.