Emmeline , and: The Collected Letters of Charlotte Smith (review)

REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS301 Charlotte Smith. Emmeline, ed. Loraine Fletcher. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2003. 520pp. CDN22.95. ISBN 1-55111-359-7. The Collected Letters of Charlotte Smith, ed. Judith Phillips Stanton. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003. xlvii+814pp. US59.95. ISBN 0-253-34012-8. Popular novelist Charlotte Smith (1749-1806), long an uncelebrated but brilliant and prolific writer of the eighteendi century, is finally achieving critical and scholarly acclaim. I am pleased to review two marvellous additions to die Smidi industry: Loraine Fletcher's critical edition ofJSmnii/irœandJudidi Phillips Stanton's edition of TL· CollectedLetters ofCharlotteSmith. I cannot praise the work of diese two scholars enough for dieir dedication to Smidi's œuvre. Emmeline, tL· Orphan oftL· Castle, Smidi's first novel and runaway best-seller, was praised by Sir Walter Scott and Jane Austen, and Smith's publisher, Thomas Cadell, paid her more dian die agreed-upon price because he was so excited widi die novel's success. Clearly, Smith touched die hopes and anxieties of her reading public as she "questioned aristocratic privilege and encouraged social change" (9). Fletcher's introduction provides the context for die novel, examining die philosophic Enlightenment, marriage, Godiic architecture , die sublime, political liberty, and, ofcourse, Charlotte Smidi's writing career. Her discussion ofSmidi's preoccupation widi die emergence ofdie new commercial class and die explosion of die reading public is exceptionally helpful, as is her distillation ofdie philosophy ofJeanjacques Rousseau and its relationship to die novel. But most useful is Fletcher's acute rendering of eighteenth-century "distress," "a critical term for the interface between a novel's feeling characters and the uncaring society depicted" (12) . Madness is usually the result of "distress," and Smidi attempts to depict such angst in Adelina's broken sentence patterns, with scenes of eavesdropping, sleepwalking , sleep-talking, and die like—all quite innovative for die time. In the end, however, Emmeline is a Cinderella-story, and die titular heroine, poised between sense and sensibility, allows society and convention to triumph. Fletcher includes contemporary reviews of the novel, portions of critical treatises on the position ofwomen and marriage, and excerpts from Smidi contemporaries such as Mary Collier, Edmund Burke, Hester Chapone,John Gregory, and MaryWollstonecraft, making this an invaluable introduction to eighteendi-century feminine fiction. Stanton's TL· Collected Letters ofQiarhtte Smith is equally impressive. Stanton publishes here for the first time "the almost 500 surviving letters that Smidi wrote to publishers, patrons, solicitors, relatives, and friends" (xiv) diat cover Smith's entire writing career from 1784 to 1806. Her achievement is monumental, for with this collection, the scholar of eighteenth-century fiction can now ascertain "one woman's writer's relations witii booksellers ... 302 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION17:2 and thereby shed light on women and patronage in the late eighteenth century" (xiv). As well, die collection details die survival and even diriving of a single parent with twelve children, and these letters "illuminate one woman's life in a world oflimited rights for women" (xiv). The letters raise many questions not only about Smidi but also about die lot of eighteendicentury women writers in general. For example, how did Smidi view her own literary output? Did she write only for money, "or was there an underlying seriousness about die artistic value ofwhat she wrote?" (xv). Stanton tries to answer these and related questions in her introduction and concludes diat Charlotte Smidi is finally a conundrum, more interested in die business of publishing dian die creative act, more isolated from odierwriters dian a part ofa coterie. Ultimately, Stanton concludes diat it "was Smidi's marriage diat set die course ofher life as a modier, writer, and for all practical purposes, an exile from polite society" (xxi). The letters reveal that her husband, Benjamin Smith, was worse than any of die scoundrels she created in her fiction, a "violent capricious spenddirift" (xxii). The letters place Smith "squarely in die cult ofsensibility, she believed in die virtue ofkindness, in generosity to diose less fortunate, and in die cultivation of die finer feelings of sympauiy and tenderness for those who suffered needlessly" (xxx). Stanton astutely presents the real Smith to critics and scholars of the long eighteenth...

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