The Works of Charlotte Smith
General Editor: Stuart Curran
Volume Editors: Adriana Craciun, Stuart Curran, Kate Davies, Elizabeth Dolan, Ina Ferris, Michael Gamer, M O Grenby, Harriet Guest, Jacqueline Labbe, D L Macdonald, A A Markley, Judith Pascoe, Judith Stanton and Kristina Straub
The Pickering Masters
978 1 85196 789 6: 234x156mm: £450.00/$795.00
978 1 85196 790 2: 234x156mm: £450.00/$795.00
978 1 85196 795 7: 234x156mm: £375.00/$675.00
In recent years the central position held by Charlotte Turner Smith during the formative years of the British Romantic period has become increasingly clear. Although Wordsworth rightly foresaw her status as a poet ‘to whom English verse is under greater obligations than are likely to be either acknowledged or remembered’, in our time her fortune has turned and her poetry has been restored to the canon where it manifests a range of metrical experimentation and intellectual resilience unmatched by any other woman poet of the time.
Less attention has been paid to Smith’s eleven novels and two fictional adaptations from the French because few of these have been reprinted until recently, and the majority have never been reprinted at all. This edition, however, will reveal the extent to which Smith’s work in this form constitutes as significant an achievement as her poetry, representing the turbulent decade of the 1790s on its social and political, as well as literary, planes with an unparalleled richness of detail and an unblinkered vision. Whatever subgenres of the novel Smith engages – gothic, sentimental, domestic, political – she informs with her distinctive social consciousness, which in an increasingly repressive climate is steadfastly liberal and broadly inclusive. In her concentration on the plight of women and of those dispossessed by warfare Smith stakes claims far in advance of her time.
The same social consciousness and propensity for fictional realism inform the five books that Charlotte Smith wrote for children, none of which has been reprinted before this edition. For scholars increasingly attentive to cultural values embedded in early children’s literature, Smith’s daring injection of political and class issues into them and her concentration on the natural world as the central text for study will be seen as crucial in the development of this form. Smith writes with a calculated determination to enlarge the sphere of children’s comprehension so as to integrate moral, social, scientific and imaginative education.
The Works of Charlotte Smith restores an essential voice in British Romanticism to the prominence she held in her own time, revealing a writer who wrote well in many genres, and, in whatever form she undertook, was innovative with the forms she inherited and strongly influential on those who followed her.
Contents
Volume 1
Manon L’Escaut, or The fatal attachment (1786); The Romance of Real Life (1787)
Smith’s first two publications in prose are adaptations of French texts in which she first explores the plight of women in a world governed by men’s appetites and legal restrictions, themes she will return to throughout her career.
Volume 2
Emmeline, the Orphan of the Castle (1788)
Charlotte Smith’s first original fiction sets the pattern for the abiding concern of her later novels: how women cope with the restricted choices society offers them. By tracing the intersecting plots of three heroines, she constructs a complicated social fabric that at once satirizes high society and suggestively demonstrates how women can empower themselves amid its constraints. The candour with which she treats women’s sexuality here becomes a distinguishing characteristic of all her fiction.
Volume 3
Ethelinde, or the Recluse of the Lake (1789)
A darker novel than her first, Ethelinde also enlarges the social spheres and landscapes in which Smith sets her characters, moving effortlessly between a gothic abbey in England ’s Lake District and the King’s Bench Prison in London , between selfish aristocrats and impoverished virtue, between rural content and the lures of colonial exploitation.
Volume 4
Celestina (1791)
Smith’s growing confidence as a novelist allows her to expand even further the scope of her concerns. Emboldened by the spirit of the first year of the French Revolution, she both enlarges the social worlds in which her heroine functions and moves her fiction between England and a France reinvigorated by its revolutionary energies. With strong political sympathies Charlotte Smith daringly uses her novel to engage in contemporary debates over how Britain should react to sweeping social change.
Volume 5
Desmond (1792)
Even more politically adventurous, Desmond moves back and forth between France and England , and, as an epistolary novel set between 1790 and 1792, openly reconfigures the recent historical record from a radical perspective.
Volume 6
The Old Manor House (1794)
Generally considered Smith’s masterpiece, this novel again enlarges her perspective. Moving back a generation in time and between England and the battlefields of revolutionary America , Smith continues to insinuate political ideas in the face of growing censorship. The novel’s candid sexuality seems likewise deliberately to resist the reactionary climate that followed Britain ’s declaring war on France .
Volume 7
The Wanderings of Warwick (1794); The Banished Man (1794)
Smith’s novella, The Wanderings of Warwick is the first-person narrative of an auxiliary character in The Old Manor House who moves from the West Indies, of which Smith gained knowledge through assisting her father-in-law in his trading business, to Portugal, Spain, and, eventually, England. In The Banished Man exile is the broad theme around which Smith gathers an international and multilingual cast of characters dislocated by the European war. In this text she also wittily introduces a woman novelist modeled on herself.
Volume 8
Montalbert (1795)
A chronicle history of two generations of unconventional women victimised by marriage to proud, violent husbands, Montalbert is Smith’s darkest exploration of the institution of marriage and of the insidious gender politics constraining contemporary women.
Volume 9
Marchmont (1796)
A precursor of Bleak House, Marchmont is Smith’s most direct attack on the legal system she felt had persecuted her and her children. Lawyers, bailiffs, and legal functionaries invade every corner of the novel. The novel also features a heroine who sets to work for her living.
Volume 10
The Young Philosopher (1798)
Dedicated to Mary Wollstonecraft and clearly invoking William Godwin among its characters, The Young Philosopher, for all its ideological commitment and satiric vigor, reveals little cause for hope in its extensive social critique.
Volume 11
Letters of a Solitary Wanderer (1800, 1802)
An experimental collection of five novellas unified by a nameless Wanderer, this work places each novella in a different geographical setting – Yorkshire, Jamaica, sixteenth-century France, eighteenth-century Germany, and modern Ireland – and is centered around themes of religious strife and pervasive threats to domestic peace.
Volume 12
Rural Walks (1795); Rambles Farther (1796); Minor Morals (1798)
Smith’s contributions to children’s conduct literature are notable for their liberal political sentiments, their realistic representation of the rural countryside and their emphasis on precise natural description, and the use of poetry for inculcating moral values.
A Narrative of the Loss of the Catherine (1796)
This is a brief journalistic piece, written to raise money for the victims of a shipwreck.
Volume 13
Who is She? (1798); Conversations Introducing Poetry, chiefly on subjects of natural history (1804); The Natural History of Birds (1807)
What is She?, a sprightly comedy, is Smith’s only effort for the stage. The Conversations and History of Birds are continuations of her children’s writings and are remarkably vibrant works from the now invalid Smith. The Conversations represents the first attempt to teach children how to read poetry; poetry also intrudes, mainly through imaginative fables, on avian culture. In both books Smith’s commitment to natural particularity carries moral and political overtones.
Volume 14
Poems
Including both volumes of Elegiac Sonnets (1784, 1797), The Emigrants (1792), and Beachy Head, and Other Poems (1807), this volume will collect all of Smith’s verse, authoritatively edited, into a single volume.
Reviews
'Scholars working on Smith have had to make do with editions created on divergent principles and scattered among multiple publishers. They will be delighted to see these volumes...the annotations are clear and copious (including detailed accounts of how her translations differ from the originals) and the books are beautifully produced. Romanticists will be grateful.
Summing Up: Essential'
– CHOICE