Charlotte Smith (1749–1806) was a popular and influential writer whose esthetic innovations helped propel a cultural shift from the neoclassicism of the eighteenth century to the techniques and sentiments that would come to characterize the Romantic period. She was well known as a novelist, author of educational works, and poet. Having suffered from various personal and financial misfortunes, she was inspired to publish both by literary ambition and by the pressure to earn a livelihood that would support herself and her children. Capitalizing on the contemporary popularity of the discourse of sensibility, she regularly incorporated her personal struggles and the melancholy they triggered into her literary productions, often employing Gothic techniques to do so. Consequently, she was widely known as a sentimental writer endowed with a heightened capacity for feeling. Though she was born in London, she preferred living in rural environments and spent much of her life in Sussex and Surrey, which inspired settings in many of her works. Her novels and translations secured her popularity and afforded her the greatest financial benefits, but her greatest literary accomplishments were in poetry: specifically, her collection, Elegiac Sonnets (1784), and her posthumously published blank-verse epic poem, Beachy Head (1807). Throughout her prolific career, Smith encouraged her readers to feel sympathy with those less fortunate than themselves. She also sought to foster an appreciation for the transporting power of nature. To do so, she regularly incorporated natural history into her works, thereby encouraging ornithological, botanical, and geological interest and study.