Poet and novelist Charlotte Turner Smith provides an unusual example of a Romantic period woman who began as a coterie poet, but out of necessity became a professional writer. Charlotte Turner was born into a well-to-do family, but after the early death of her mother, she was consigned first to the care of an aunt, then to boarding school. Soon after she reached her teens, her father remarried, and having thus become an inconvenience, Charlotte was married off at the age of fifteen to the dissipated, unfaithful, and violent Benjamin Smith, who kept the family perpetually in debt and with whom she ultimately bore twelve children. The groom's father clearly understood his son's nature, for at his death he left a significant fortune specifically for his daughter-in-law and grandchildren. The will was so complex, however, that the money was tied up in litigation until after both Charlotte and her husband were dead and the children matured. In the meantime, Smith's husband was consigned to prison for debt, where she joined him, there composing poetry for sale in an attempt to relieve their financial distress. The result was Elegiac Sonnets, and Other Essays (1784), which was revised and enlarged numerous times until 1797 and eventually included prefatory essays that delineate principles of sonnet composition. Though she separated from her husband soon after, Smith continued to support herself, her children, and to some extent her estranged spouse through her writing. She first tried translating, and then in 1788 she published her first novel, Emmeline, the Orphan of the Castle. The novels that followed include Ethelinde; or, The Recluse of the Lake (1789), Celestina (1791), Desmond (1792), The Old Manor House (1793), The Wanderings of Warwick (1794), The Banished Man (1794), Montalbert (1795), Marchmont (1796), and The Young Philosopher (1798). The Letters of a Solitary Wanderer (1800-1) is a collection of short narratives. Smith's second major poetic publication was The Emigrants: A Poem, in Two Books (1793). Beachy Head: With Other Poems (1807) was published posthumously. Smith's contributions to youth literature are also extensive, beginning with Rural Walks: In Dialogues. Intended for the Use of Young Persons (1795), and continuing through Rambles Farther: A Continuation of Rural Walks, in Dialogues. Intended for the Use of Young Persons (1796), Minor Morals, Interspersed with Sketches of Natural History, Historical Anecdotes, and Original Stories (1798), Conversations Introducing Poetry: Chiefly on the Subjects of Natural History. For the Use of Children and Young Persons (1804), The History of England, from the Earliest Records to the Peace of Amiens, in a Series of Letters to a Young Lady at School (1806), which was begun by Smith but completed by Mary Hays when Smith became too ill to finish the project, and The Natural History of Birds: Intended Chiefly for Young Persons (1807). Smith also published two translations, the first in 1785 translates Manon Lescaut by Abbé Antoine-Francois Prévost. The second translates anecdotes from François Gayot de Pitaval's Causes Célèbres et interessantes as The Romance of Real Life, (1787).