When William Hayley invited Charlotte Smith to join him at Eartham for a writer's retreat, the poet William Cowper observed her ‘[c]hain'd to her desk like a slave to his oar’. She would produce twenty new pages in a morning – an extraordinary pace – and read them to Hayley 's guests in the afternoon. Cowper did not acknowledge, or perhaps did not see, that Smith was, as Sarah Zimmerman writes, ‘pursu[ing] two writing careers at once: her published works and a copious correspondence’, a significant portion of which letters are published in The Collected Letters of Charlotte Smith. This collection, and Stuart Curran's magisterial edition of her works now complete at Pickering & Chatto, mark Smith's rising star, a new mini-industry of Smithian studies, engaging us in the most honourable and exciting project of elaborating on and proving Curran's bold and welcome claim that Charlotte Smith is the first Romantic poet.

It was not always so. I first heard of Smith in 1967 as a college junior in a course on the English novel. Our secondary reading, Edward Wagenknecht's Cavalcade of the Novel, proclaimed The Old Manor House to be, ‘excepting the work of the acknowledged masters … surely one of the best romances in the whole realm of English fiction’. That stuck with me. In fact none of Smith's novel s or poetry was in print that year, a situation shortly remedied by Anne Henry Ehrenpries's handsome hardback editions of The Old Manor House (1969) and Emmeline (1971). By then I was a graduate student focusing on British literature and the novel at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill. On campus, opposition to the war in Vietnam was peaking. Even at a sleepy southern campus like UNC, student protests over the war and the ongoing protests in the civil rights movement disrupted classes, but they also pointed us women graduate students to an older entrenched injustice in our coursework. The English department's official list of authors for Phd candidates to study included only Jane Austen, the Brontes, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf among a host of men.