The Works of Charlotte Smith

In a letter to the Dublin clergyman Joseph Cooper Walker dated 9 October 1793, Charlotte Smith famously wrote, “I love Novels ‘no more than a Grocer does figs.’”[1] The words may be Henry Fielding’s—the quotation is from Joseph Andrews (1742)—but the sentiment has come to seem uniquely Charlotte Smith’s own. The author’s daily struggle to support her large family and her exhausting legal battle over her father-in-law’s estate were well known to her readers, before whom she controversially made public her private woes in prefaces, footnotes, and advertisements. Within the narrative of virtue in distress this elaborate paratextual apparatus constructed, Smith frequently presented novel writing as sheer drudgery, fatiguing mind and body and exposing the genteel woman writer to the unscrupulous and mercenary designs of publishers and critics.

By the time Smith penned her letter to Walker, however, she had already authored five novels—love them or hate them—two translations, the highly successful Elegiac Sonnets (1784), and a remarkable revolutionary poem, The Emigrants (1793). By 1807, the year after her death, she published a further six works for children, a comedy, a pamphlet, a volume of poetry, and another six novels. Her first four works of fiction are reprinted here alongside her translations, Manon L’Escaut (1785) and The Romance of Real Life (1787), as the first five of the fourteen-volume complete Works of Charlotte Smith. The picture that emerges in these finely edited volumes belies the image of the reluctant author Smith so carefully constructed throughout her career. Her intervention in contemporary debates on the status of romance, history and the novel, her reworking of the conventional courtship plot, her use of fiction to address various forms of political and social injustice and her careful revisions of the novels (made available here in useful listings of textual variants) reveal a Smith who was an innovator and a consummate professional. Smith’s apparent disdain for the novel, these editions suggest, should be viewed with due skepticism.

Stuart Curran’s general introduction to the Works rises to the daunting task of engaging Smith’s prolific output with his customary skill and clarity. What unites Smith’s work, he persuasively suggests, is the “improbable marriage ... of contraries”: sensibility and the “romance of real life” (I xxvii). In the fiction, Curran argues, this wedding of opposing states of being forced a new kind of realism, or “complex sociology,” upon the novel (I xvi). Smith’s life-long commitment to exposing social and economic injustice took her novels below stairs, to the debtors’ prisons and rural hovels that would not become embedded in the novel’s social landscape until decades after Smith’s death. Michael Gamer elaborates Curran’s discussion of Smith’s innovative re-imagining of form and genre in his introduction to the translations, which, with Ethelinde (1790), are the only volumes in this set not to have been recently republished elsewhere. For Smith, as Gamer comments in his discussion of the preface to The Romance of Real Life, romance and history were complementary modes of perception and narration: “Romance and fact, it turns out, can accommodate to the other to mutual advantage and with ‘interesting’ results” (I xxxiv). Although its implications are not worked through in Gamer’s introduction, this important recognition provides a fruitful way of reading Smith’s fiction, especially later novels such as The Old Manor House (1793) and the wonderful, if desperately bleak, Marchmont (1796). In these novels, romance softens the blows that history inflicts upon the vulnerable; historical fact, simultaneously, unwrites the illusions of romance, which—as Smith relentlessly argued through her literary works—served only to subjugate women.

The early novels reprinted here are rather lighter in tone, if not in substance, than Smith’s later, post-Revolutionary works. Their greatest debt, as several editors point out, is to the courtship novels of Frances Burney, to whose Evelina (1778) and Cecilia (1782) Smith’s first works were frequently compared. In her introduction to Emmeline (1788), Judith Stanton, whose indispensable Collected Letters of Charlotte Smith (2003) must be the unacknowledged fifteenth volume of this set, argues that Smith overreached herself in her first novel by trying to produce a “bestseller.” The “piling on of courtships, seductions and marriages”—the heroine alone is pursued by six men—is somewhat excessive, but it is also, as Stanton indicates, a mechanism of the novel’s critique of marriage and its detrimental effect on women, their children, and the nation’s moral economy (II xxiii). In Ethelinde Smith showed greater control in her rendering of the courtship plot, but rather less restraint when approaching word limits. At five volumes, and some 1500 pages in its original typesetting, Charlotte Smith’s melancholy novel about the true cost of old and new forms of wealth, is also her longest. Despite the fact that it speaks to so many of the dominant concerns of Romantic scholarship—including the expansion of global trade and empire, the conflict between moral and political economy, the relationship between landscape and nation—it is also the least known of the novels in this set. Emmeline, Celestina, and Desmond are available in rather more economical Broadview editions, with excellent introductions and supplementary materials, which make them ideal teaching texts. It is rather disappointing, therefore, that Ethelinde, no less extraordinary, though more unfamiliar, than these other works, has, at less than six and a half pages, the shortest introduction.

Kristina Straub’s longer and fascinating introduction to Celestina more than compensates for the (I suspect imposed) shortness of the introduction to volume three. It is, furthermore, the only one of the five introductions to offer a sustained reading of its text rather than a more general, though no less useful, account of its principal preoccupations and publication history. In it, Straub develops Stanton’s account of Smith’s indebtedness to Burney by examining how the former created “fictional world[s] in which the complexity of the characters, male and female, exceeds the simplicity of marriage as a happy-ever-after ending to the difficulties of courtship” (IV viii). Those few scholars who have mined the rich seams of Smith’s work have tended to focus attention on her female characters, many of whom are read as fictional extensions of the author herself. Straub urges us to refocus our attention on Smith’s construction and radical “reassessment of masculinity” (IV viii). Smith, Straub demonstrates, is much more “sympathetic” to the men who persecute her heroine than Burney, who punishes them with violence and humiliation. Her heroes—a major source of disappointment for Smith’s readers and, almost certainly, for Smith’s heroines—are, by contrast, unnaturally feminized, although frequently consumed by the same will to possess and own their future wives that their rakish counterparts express more openly. Smith’s refusal to reproduce the conventional types of male—the virtuous man of feeling, the irredeemable rake—results in a new kind of novel whose characters “exceed the models offered by the courtship plot and, implicitly, the life models of marriage and the estate” (IV xxii).

Desmond, is, of course, the best known of the works in this first tranche of volumes. As its editor Stuart Curran points out, it also marks an important shift in Smith’s writing, not only to more overtly politicized and Eurocentric narratives, but to novels whose title protagonists are all men—the exception to the rule being The Old Manor House. Curran reads this shift as evidence of an enlargement in Smith’s “conceptual field” and a desire to move the female-authored novel into previously uncharted territory (V xiv). It is difficult to hold with Curran’s view that the heroes whose names give the titles to so many of Smith’s novels are their “main” focus (V xiv)—Geraldine Verney is as central to Desmond as the work’s title character, as is Medora Glenmorris to The Young Philosopher (1798), while Althea Dacres is much more compelling than her peripatetic, not to say pathetic, lover, the eponymous Marchmont. But what this doubling of narrative perspective enables, as Curran suggests, is a vivid analysis of the “notion of separate spheres of language and conduct” and the heartbreaking double standards this ideology served to uphold (V xv). The skillful accommodation of narrative form to political content Smith achieves here and in the later novels is surely one of her greatest achievements.

It is perhaps not surprising, given Smith’s own disavowals of the novel form, that her poetry has been given much greater prominence in recent critical studies. The pioneering work on the poems by Stuart Curran and Jacqueline Labbe (editor of the forthcoming Sonnets and Beachy Head) has secured Smith’s place within the Romantic canon. The novels have attracted much less critical attention, a fact amply demonstrated by the short (but not always up-to-date) bibliographies included in each of these volumes. This welcome and handsomely produced edition of The Works of Charlotte Smith will undoubtedly rectify this situation by establishing Smith’s undeniable place in the history of the novel.

[1] The Collected Letters of Charlotte Smith, ed. Judith Phillips Stanton (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003), 80.