This text offers a thorough and complete reading of Charlotte Smith's poetry and argues that we need to engage more directly with historical ideas of gender. Labbe demonstrates that Smith is both cannier about the attractions of gender than has previously been recognized and more experimental in her deployments of gendered subjectivities. In this way she is a key player in the formation of Romanticism as a style and as an approach. Beachy Head), as well as the prose apparatus to the poetry (prefaces, dedications and footnotes), this book reads Smith's work in light of her self-representations as a poet, mother and social critic and uncovers a hitherto unexamined coherence in both content and style. Smith is shown to be both an annovator and a significant figure in understanding Romantic conceptions of gender.