SMITH, Anna Young

Born 5 November 1756, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; died 3 April 1780, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Wrote under: Sylvia

Daughter of James and Jane Graeme Young; married William Smith, 1775; children: three

After the death of their mother, Anna Young Smith and her brother were raised at Graeme Park near Philadelphia by their aunt, Elizabeth Fergusson. Fergusson was a prolific poet and correspondent, a circumstance which may have encouraged Smith in her own writing. Smith's early poetry and letters suggest admiration for Fergusson's talent and gratitude for her kindness. Most of Smith's extant poems were written before her marriage, to which her father apparently did not consent. Smith died as a young woman, probably of complications resulting from the birth of her third child (contradictory accounts leave the circumstance and precise date of her death in dispute).

Smith's poems reveal a woman of firm opinions and wide-ranging interests. She treated political and feminist themes as well as the more conventional subjects of love and courtship, gratitude, sensibility, and grief. Her "Elegy to the Memory of the American Volunteers…, " for example, places her on the side of the rebels during the Revolutionary War: "Where e'er the Barb'rous story shall be told, / The British cheek shall glow with conscious shame."

Smith was as firm in her demand for fair treatment of women as she was in her politics. She responded to "Reading [Jonathan] Swift's Works" in characteristically strong language: "Ungenerous bard, whom not e'en Stella's charms / Thy vengeful satire of its sting disarms! / Say when thou, dipp'st thy keenest pen in gall, / Why must it still on helpless woman fall? / …thy harsh satire, rude, severe, unjust, / Awakes too oft our anger or disgust." Other more conventional pieces detail Smith's courtship, her gratitude to her aunt, a tribute to her grandfather, and advice to a friend.

Creating in a very short time a body of poetry remarkable for its diversity, Smith leaves one wishing she had more than 24 years to pursue her craft.

Other Works:

Manuscript poems by Anna Young Smith are in Elizabeth Fergusson's commonplace book, Dickinson College Library. Nine poems were published individually in periodicals, one in the Pennsylvania Magazine (June 1775) and eight in the Universal Asylum and Columbian Magazine 5-9 (1790-1792).

Bibliography:

Armstrong, Edward, ed., Memoirs of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (1864). Cowell, P., Women Poets in Pre-Revolutionary America, 1650-1775 (1981).

Reference works:

Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States (1995).

—PATTIE COWELL