Susan Wolfson argued that the work of women Romantic poets like Charlotte Smith “maintained propriety by sticking to subjects and genres deemed ‘feminine’”.  Anne K. Mellor elaborated by defining the figure of the ‘poetess’, discussing how female poets were limited to writing within the domestic sphere and conforming to the Burkean concept of the ‘beautiful’. I propose that Charlotte Smith in Sonnet LXX worked to destabilise this gendered definition of female poetry by creating a male figure to embody her desires, essentially labeling her want for sexual freedom, spatial freedom, and poetic freedom as masculine. As a woman within society, confined to a genre of the picturesque, the representation of her wants is a wild male, outside of the remits of sanity and society, set against an untamed backdrop. The lunatic acts as both antithesis and antidote to Smith’s highly structured world, and thus personifies her yearning for transgression. By inverting what would be considered desirable virtues in feminine poetry, she subverts expectations, using the figure of the lunatic to satirize the notion of hysteria commonly attached to female desire.